THE POLICE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Message In A Bottle

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 143, 145-146 and 149-154, and 6 more places -- 15.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
151 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
185
LENGTH
4:54
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 151 BPM
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE · BAR 143

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 55 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 71 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 98 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 98, 116, 133 and 151 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 Message In A Bottle use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 151 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 143, 145-146, 149-154 and 157-159, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Message In A Bottle hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 185 BARS ANALYSED