FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Fire Island

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 34-66 and 68-86 -- 51.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
146 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
101
LENGTH
2:46
DIFFICULTY
36/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 146 BPM
FIRE ISLAND · BAR 34

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 36 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 110 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, ride 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 110, 128 and 146 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 Island use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 146 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 51.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 34-66 and 68-86. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Fire Island hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 101 BARS ANALYSED