GLENN FREDLY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Kasih Putih

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23, 37-39 and 42-45 -- 28% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
75
LENGTH
2:30
DIFFICULTY
27/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
KASIH PUTIH · BAR 17

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 14 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 27 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Kasih Putih use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 37-39 and 42-45. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Kasih Putih hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 75 BARS ANALYSED