PHIL COLLINS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Wish It Would Rain Down

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 50-52, 54-56 and 58, and 7 more places -- 25.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
63 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
86
LENGTH
5:28
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 63 BPM
I WISH IT WOULD RAIN DOWN · BAR 52

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 67 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 47 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 47, 55 and 63 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 Wish It Would Rain Down use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 63 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 50-52, 54-56, 58 and 60, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Wish It Would Rain Down hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 86 BARS ANALYSED