DLAWINSTYING · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in NO FAP

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-9, 30-37 and 45, and 4 more places -- 32.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
195 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
137
LENGTH
2:49
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 195 BPM
NO FAP · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 59 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 68 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 127 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 127, 150, 172 and 195 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 NO FAP use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 195 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-9, 30-37, 45 and 75-76, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in NO FAP hard?

59 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 137 BARS ANALYSED