ASKING ALEXANDRIA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Moving On

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2, 4 and 6, and 33 more places -- 30% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
127
LENGTH
3:46
DIFFICULTY
43/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
MOVING ON · BAR 26

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 43 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 101 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, and nothing else. 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 101, 118 and 135 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 Moving On use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2, 4, 6 and 8, and 32 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Moving On hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 43 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 · 127 BARS ANALYSED