ALEX WARREN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Eternity

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 20-23, 28 and 35-39, and 4 more places -- 43.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
66
LENGTH
1:53
DIFFICULTY
5/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
ETERNITY · BAR 28

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 5 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 104 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 104, 121 and 138 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 Eternity use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 43.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 20-23, 28, 35-39 and 41-43, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Eternity hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 5 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how little of it repeats.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 66 BARS ANALYSED