COHEED AND CAMBRIA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Mother Superior

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-36, 45 and 47, and 41 more places -- 34.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
129 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
236
LENGTH
5:29
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 129 BPM
MOTHER SUPERIOR · BAR 21

It is played on crash, ride 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 40 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 97 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, 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 97, 113 and 129 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 Mother Superior use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride and kick, in 3/4 at 129 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-36, 45, 47 and 49, and 40 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Mother Superior hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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 · 236 BARS ANALYSED