AS I LAY DYING · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Losing Sight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-35, 37-39 and 41-43, and 9 more places -- 24.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
3:19
DIFFICULTY
58/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
LOSING SIGHT · BAR 34

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 58 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 131 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, and nothing else. 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 131, 153 and 175 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 Losing Sight use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 24.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 33-35, 37-39, 41-43 and 45-47, and 8 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 Losing Sight hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 58 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 · 145 BARS ANALYSED