BOSTON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Foreplay/Long Time

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 88-102, 104-106 and 108, and 6 more places -- 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
179 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
243
LENGTH
5:26
DIFFICULTY
80/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 179 BPM
FOREPLAY/LONG TIME · BAR 89

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 80 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 116 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 116, 137, 158 and 179 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 Foreplay/Long Time use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 179 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 88-102, 104-106, 108 and 110, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 24 times over the song.

Is the beat in Foreplay/Long Time hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 80 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 243 BARS ANALYSED