BLINK-182 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Feeling This

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 12, 16 and 20, and 13 more places -- 25% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
173 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
119
LENGTH
2:45
DIFFICULTY
58/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 173 BPM
FEELING THIS · BAR 85

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 33 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 58 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 130 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, and nothing else. 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 130, 151 and 173 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 Feeling This use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 173 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12, 16, 20 and 24, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Feeling This hard?

33 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 58 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 · 119 BARS ANALYSED