CINDERELLA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Fallin' Apart at the Seams

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23, 45-51 and 75-81, and 1 more place -- 26.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
124
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
28/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
FALLIN' APART AT THE SEAMS · BAR 18

It is played on the hi-hat, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 28 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 86 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 86, 101 and 115 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 Fallin' Apart at the Seams use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 45-51, 75-81 and 107-113. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Fallin' Apart at the Seams hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 124 BARS ANALYSED