HUMAN TETRIS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Long Flight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-59, 61-67 and 69-75, and 8 more places -- 73.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
190 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
197
LENGTH
4:09
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 190 BPM
LONG FLIGHT · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 59 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 65 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 124 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 124, 146, 168 and 190 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 Flight use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 190 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 73.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-59, 61-67, 69-75 and 77-83, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Long Flight hard?

59 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 197 BARS ANALYSED