ELLE KING · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Exes and Ohs

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-20, 37-56 and 81-88, and 1 more place -- 44.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
117
LENGTH
3:21
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
EXES AND OHS · BAR 1

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 52 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 65 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 91 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 91, 107, 124 and 140 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 Exes and Ohs use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 44.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-20, 37-56, 81-88 and 113-116. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Exes and Ohs hard?

52 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 117 BARS ANALYSED