ANCO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Futuring The Past

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 35-50 -- 32.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
66
LENGTH
1:39
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
FUTURING THE PAST · BAR 35

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 45 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 37 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 120 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. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 120, 140 and 160 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 Futuring The Past use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 35-50. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Futuring The Past hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 66 BARS ANALYSED