LOVEJOY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Foxholes

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-39 and 88-102 -- 34.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
164 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
3:32
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 164 BPM
FOXHOLES · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 59 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 123 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 123, 144 and 164 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 Foxholes use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 164 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-39 and 88-102. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Foxholes hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 145 BARS ANALYSED