TONIC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in If You Could Only See

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 16-19, 32-47 and 64-75, and 1 more place -- 50.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
4:08
DIFFICULTY
25/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
IF YOU COULD ONLY SEE · BAR 32

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 13 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 25 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 75 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 75, 88 and 100 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 If You Could Only See use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 16-19, 32-47, 64-75 and 92-103. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in If You Could Only See hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 25 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 · 104 BARS ANALYSED