VANCE JOY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Fire and the Flood

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-48 and 85-92 -- 25.3% 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
117
LENGTH
4:04
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
FIRE AND THE FLOOD · BAR 33

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 31 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 45 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. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. 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 Fire and the Flood use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 33-48 and 85-92. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Fire and the Flood hard?

31 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 117 BARS ANALYSED