DEFTONES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Melanie

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-35, 37-39 and 41-43, and 9 more places -- 27.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
195 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
2:55
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 195 BPM
MELANIE · BAR 33

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 146 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 146, 171 and 195 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 Melanie use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 195 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.3% 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 silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Melanie hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 141 BARS ANALYSED