STILL CORNERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Far Rider

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-60, 78-99 and 101, and 2 more places -- 97.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
126 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
221
LENGTH
7:00
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 126 BPM
FAR RIDER · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 48 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 95 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 95, 110 and 126 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 Far Rider use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 126 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 97.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-60, 78-99, 101 and 106-161, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Far Rider hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 221 BARS ANALYSED