MATTHEW WEST · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Good

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 63-83 and 112-118 -- 32.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
170 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
119
LENGTH
2:48
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 170 BPM
GOOD · BAR 63

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 40 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 35 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 128 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 128, 149 and 170 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 Good use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 170 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 63-83 and 112-118. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Good hard?

40 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 35 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 · 119 BARS ANALYSED