BRAND NEW · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Failure By Design

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 35, 38 and 40, and 22 more places -- 19.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
180 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
3:12
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 180 BPM
FAILURE BY DESIGN · BAR 38

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 40 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 135 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, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 135, 158 and 180 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 Failure By Design use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 180 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 35, 38, 40 and 43, and 21 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Failure By Design hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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