TAXI NACH PARIS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Felix de Luxe

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 32-39, 57-61 and 87-101 -- 29.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
102
LENGTH
3:08
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
FELIX DE LUXE · BAR 32

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 73 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 85 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 85, 100, 115 and 130 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 Felix de Luxe use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 32-39, 57-61 and 87-101. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Felix de Luxe hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 102 BARS ANALYSED