LEVEL 42 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Leaving Me Now

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-13, 16-19 and 26-31, and 4 more places -- 43.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
83 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
74
LENGTH
3:34
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 83 BPM
LEAVING ME NOW · BAR 10

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 40 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 62 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.

Tempo goes 62, 73 and 83 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 Leaving Me Now use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 83 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 43.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-13, 16-19, 26-31 and 34-39, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Leaving Me Now hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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 · 74 BARS ANALYSED