JASON BECKER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Opus Pocus

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 50-63, 66-72 and 74-79, and 1 more place -- 28.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
98 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
129
LENGTH
5:16
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 98 BPM
OPUS POCUS · BAR 51

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 36 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 63 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 74 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 74, 86 and 98 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 Opus Pocus use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 98 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 50-63, 66-72, 74-79 and 82-89. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Opus Pocus hard?

36 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 63 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 129 BARS ANALYSED