TAME IMPALA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Posthumous Forgiveness

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26, 28 and 46, and 3 more places -- 19.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
77 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
120
LENGTH
6:12
DIFFICULTY
31/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 77 BPM
POSTHUMOUS FORGIVENESS · BAR 26

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 31 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 58 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 58, 67 and 77 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 Posthumous Forgiveness use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 77 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26, 28, 46 and 48, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Posthumous Forgiveness hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 31 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 · 120 BARS ANALYSED