BELLE FOR THE SKY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Eastern Beauty/ Nishikigoi

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 36, 38 and 40, and 35 more places -- 17% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
225
LENGTH
7:50
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
EASTERN BEAUTY/ NISHIKIGOI · BAR 177

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 62 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 86 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. 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.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 86, 101 and 115 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 Eastern Beauty/ Nishikigoi use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 36, 38, 40 and 42, and 34 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in Eastern Beauty/ Nishikigoi hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 225 BARS ANALYSED