SOEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lotus

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 31, 35-37 and 39, and 12 more places -- 31.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
78 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
84
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 78 BPM
LOTUS · BAR 31

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 26 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 51 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 59 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, ride 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 59, 68 and 78 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 Lotus use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 78 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 31, 35-37, 39 and 44, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lotus hard?

26 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 84 BARS ANALYSED