MITSKI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in First Love/Late Spring

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 29, 31-44 and 71-77, and 3 more places -- 27.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
111
LENGTH
4:26
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
FIRST LOVE/LATE SPRING · BAR 29

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 44 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 75 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 75, 88 and 100 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 First Love/Late Spring use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 29, 31-44, 71-77 and 79-81, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in First Love/Late Spring hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 111 BARS ANALYSED