WILL WOOD AND THE TAPEWORMS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Mr. Capgras (Live)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 45-47, 49-51 and 62-64, and 7 more places -- 21.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
192 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
152
LENGTH
3:10
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 192 BPM
MR. CAPGRAS (LIVE) · BAR 46

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 70 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 144 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 144, 168 and 192 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 Mr. Capgras (Live) use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 192 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 45-47, 49-51, 62-64 and 66-68, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Mr. Capgras (Live) hard?

37 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 152 BARS ANALYSED