AFTER FOREVER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Follow In The Cry

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 31-44, 51-56 and 65-72, and 2 more places -- 33.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
127
LENGTH
3:58
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
FOLLOW IN THE CRY · BAR 31

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 38 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 60 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 96 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 96, 112 and 128 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 Follow In The Cry use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 31-44, 51-56, 65-72 and 96-100, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Follow In The Cry hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 60 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 · 127 BARS ANALYSED