THE BURSTHEAD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in God Don't Leave Me Alone

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-10, 12-13 and 15-18, and 12 more places -- 85.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
143
LENGTH
4:46
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
GOD DON'T LEAVE ME ALONE · BAR 9

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 45 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 God Don't Leave Me Alone use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 85.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-10, 12-13, 15-18 and 20-21, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in God Don't Leave Me Alone hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 143 BARS ANALYSED