AUTHORITY ZERO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Mexican Radio

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-6, 36-41 and 63-76, and 1 more place -- 32.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
102
LENGTH
2:35
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
MEXICAN RADIO · BAR 1

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 38 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 54 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 94 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 94, 109 and 125 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 Mexican Radio use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 3/4 at 125 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-6, 36-41, 63-76 and 95-101. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Mexican Radio hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 54 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 102 BARS ANALYSED