TOWA BIRD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Drain Me!

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-17, 19-29 and 31-34, and 1 more place -- 78.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
62
LENGTH
1:59
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
DRAIN ME! · BAR 4

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 53 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 94 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  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 94, 109 and 125 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 Drain Me! use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 78.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-17, 19-29, 31-34 and 51-61. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Drain Me! hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 53 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 62 BARS ANALYSED