STARSET · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in ECHO

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-11, 29-35 and 37-43, and 8 more places -- 52.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
3:36
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
ECHO · BARS 5-6

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 42 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 120 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, and nothing else. 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 120, 140 and 160 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 ECHO use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 52.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-11, 29-35, 37-43 and 45-51, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in ECHO hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED