ALTERNATIVE COMPETITION 6 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in L'improviste Inattendu

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-56, 97-98 and 101, and 3 more places -- 48.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
156
LENGTH
4:26
DIFFICULTY
33/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
L'IMPROVISTE INATTENDU · BAR 1

It is played on the snare, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 33 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 105 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 105, 123 and 140 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 L'improviste Inattendu use?

A one-bar groove on snare, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 48.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-56, 97-98, 101 and 104, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in L'improviste Inattendu hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 33 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED