RADIOHEAD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in How To Disappear Completely

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 12-59 -- 34.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
78 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
150
LENGTH
5:46
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 78 BPM
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY · BAR 12

It is played on the hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 46 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 59 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.

Tempo goes 59, 68 and 78 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 How To Disappear Completely use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat foot, in 3/4 at 78 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12-59. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in How To Disappear Completely hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 46 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 150 BARS ANALYSED