ANATHEMA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Fragile Dreams

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 31-37, 39-45 and 47-49, and 17 more places -- 54.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
134 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
174
LENGTH
5:12
DIFFICULTY
21/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 134 BPM
FRAGILE DREAMS · BAR 31

It is played on crash and snare, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 21 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 101 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, and nothing else. 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 101, 117 and 134 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 Fragile Dreams use?

A one-bar groove on crash and snare, in 4/4 at 134 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 54.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 31-37, 39-45, 47-49 and 51-57, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Fragile Dreams hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 21 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 174 BARS ANALYSED