PSYCHONAUT 4 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Measure Time in Milliliters (tabs by kaštus ♥)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-35 and 126-140 -- 23.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
193
LENGTH
6:11
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
I MEASURE TIME IN MILLILITERS (TABS BY KAŠTUS ♥) · BAR 7

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 43 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 70 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 94 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 94, 109 and 125 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 I Measure Time in Milliliters (tabs by kaštus ♥) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-35 and 126-140. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Measure Time in Milliliters (tabs by kaštus ♥) hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 193 BARS ANALYSED