COLDPLAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-28 -- 31.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
118 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
88
LENGTH
2:59
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 118 BPM
EVERY TEARDROP IS A WATERFALL · BAR 5

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 50 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 89 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.

Tempo goes 89, 103 and 118 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 Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 118 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-28. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 88 BARS ANALYSED