TAKING BACK SUNDAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in MakeDamnSure

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-33, 58-73 and 98-104 -- 28.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
141 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
114
LENGTH
3:13
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 141 BPM
MAKEDAMNSURE · BAR 27

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 48 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 106 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 106, 123 and 141 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 MakeDamnSure use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 141 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-33, 58-73 and 98-104. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in MakeDamnSure hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 114 BARS ANALYSED