UFO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Doctor Doctor

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-43, 47-48 and 51-75, and 2 more places -- 67.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
107 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
133
LENGTH
4:58
DIFFICULTY
80/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 107 BPM
DOCTOR DOCTOR · BAR 22

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 63 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 80 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 70 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 70, 82, 95 and 107 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Doctor Doctor use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 107 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 67.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-43, 47-48, 51-75 and 85-107, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Doctor Doctor hard?

63 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 80 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 133 BARS ANALYSED