Happy Birthday In The Sky · Placebo

136 bars of 4/4 at 112 BPM, about 4:51 of playing, on crash, hi-hat, snare, floor tom and kick.

55 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO

112 BPM

TIME

4/4

BARS

136

LENGTH

4:51

DIFFICULTY

55/100

silence through bars 1-8, hi-hat through bars 9-48, snare through bars 49-56, silence through bars 57-60, hi-hat through bars 61-76 and snare through bars 77-92, and 2 more changes after that.

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 9-11, 13 and 15-19, and 10 more places -- 33.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

    9                10
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a 1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
HH |o-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
SD |----x--g----x---|----x--g-g--x---|
BD |x-------x-x---x-|--x-----x--x--x-|

6 fills to learn, played 18 times: bars 47, 48, 75, 76, 84, 107 and 12 more.

It cuts the song into 22 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. The grooves the song is built on -- B, G -- 2 exercises, about 26 minutes.
2. Through Part D and Part B -- 4 exercises, about 28 minutes.
3. Through Part B and the Chorus -- 4 exercises, about 26 minutes.
4. Through the Chorus -- 2 exercises, about 18 minutes.
5. Bars 46-77 -- 5 exercises, about 32 minutes.
6. The whole song -- 6 exercises, about 28 minutes.
7. Through the Outro -- 6 exercises, about 20 minutes. Open above.