ANNO DOMINI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Freebird Type Song

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 104-247 -- 58.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
116 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
256
LENGTH
8:50
DIFFICULTY
11/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 116 BPM
FREEBIRD TYPE SONG · BAR 105

It is played on the hi-hat, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 11 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 87 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 87, 102 and 116 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 Freebird Type Song use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, in 4/4 at 116 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 58.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 104-247. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Freebird Type Song hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 11 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is the speed of the hand keeping time.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 256 BARS ANALYSED