PIERCE THE VEIL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Floral & Fading

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-5, 7-13 and 23-29 -- 20.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
87
LENGTH
3:28
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
FLORAL & FADING · BAR 4

It is played on snare, mid tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 47 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 Floral & Fading use?

A one-bar groove on snare, mid tom and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-5, 7-13 and 23-29. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Floral & Fading hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 47 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 · 87 BARS ANALYSED