UNWOUND · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lifetime Achievement Award

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17, 19 and 26, and 11 more places -- 42.1% 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
126
LENGTH
5:02
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD · 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 35 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. 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 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 Lifetime Achievement Award use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 42.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17, 19, 26 and 28, and 10 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lifetime Achievement Award hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 35 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 · 126 BARS ANALYSED