HAVE A NICE LIFE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Earthmover (Full Version)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 226-316 -- 34.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
317
LENGTH
10:34
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
EARTHMOVER (FULL VERSION) · BAR 227

It is played on mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 6 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 40 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 90 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 and 120 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 Earthmover (Full Version) use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 226-316. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Earthmover (Full Version) hard?

6 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 317 BARS ANALYSED