CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Long As I Can See The Light (with vocal)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-7, 9-23 and 25-31, and 5 more places -- 54.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
3:30
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
LONG AS I CAN SEE THE LIGHT (WITH VOCAL) · BAR 1

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 37 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 96 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 96, 112 and 128 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 Long As I Can See The Light (with vocal) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 54.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-7, 9-23, 25-31 and 33-39, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Long As I Can See The Light (with vocal) hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 112 BARS ANALYSED