FOO FIGHTERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Marigold

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 17-32, 53-68 and 81-96 -- 47.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
145 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
108
LENGTH
2:59
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 145 BPM
MARIGOLD · BARS 17-18

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 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 109 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, 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 109, 127 and 145 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 Marigold use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 145 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 47.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-32, 53-68 and 81-96. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Marigold hard?

23 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 · 108 BARS ANALYSED