ORDER FROM CHAOS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Forsake Me This Mortal Coil

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 111-113, 115-117 and 119-120, and 18 more places -- 23.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
223
LENGTH
5:25
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
FORSAKE ME THIS MORTAL COIL · BAR 111

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 83 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 124 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 124, 144 and 165 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 Forsake Me This Mortal Coil use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 111-113, 115-117, 119-120 and 123-124, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in Forsake Me This Mortal Coil hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 223 BARS ANALYSED