BORIS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Pink

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-12, 44 and 46, and 16 more places -- 47.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
155 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
164
LENGTH
4:14
DIFFICULTY
69/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 155 BPM
PINK · BAR 44

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 53 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 69 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 101 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, and nothing else. 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 101, 119, 137 and 155 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 Pink use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 155 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 47.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-12, 44, 46 and 67-69, and 15 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Pink hard?

53 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 164 BARS ANALYSED