CHRIS TOMLIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Holy Forever (original)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 226-232, 234-235 and 237, and 4 more places -- 16.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
72 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
307
LENGTH
17:00
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 72 BPM
HOLY FOREVER (ORIGINAL) · BAR 228

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 8 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 41 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 54 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 54, 63 and 72 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 Holy Forever (original) use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 72 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 226-232, 234-235, 237 and 239, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 38 times over the song.

Is the beat in Holy Forever (original) hard?

8 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 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 · 307 BARS ANALYSED