KISS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Still Love You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-24, 26-44 and 55-57, and 9 more places -- 43.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
73 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
5:57
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 73 BPM
I STILL LOVE YOU · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 62 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 55 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 55, 64 and 73 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 Still Love You use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 3/4 at 73 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 43.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-24, 26-44, 55-57 and 59-65, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Still Love You hard?

28 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 62 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 144 BARS ANALYSED