ON BROKEN WINGS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Like Starscream

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 19-21, 23-26 and 34, and 5 more places -- 26.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
95 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
150
LENGTH
6:07
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 95 BPM
LIKE STARSCREAM · BAR 119

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 62 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 71 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 71, 83 and 95 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 Like Starscream use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 95 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 19-21, 23-26, 34 and 119-121, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Like Starscream hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 62 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 150 BARS ANALYSED