JONNY, THOM & A CR-78 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Present Tense

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5, 9-17 and 20-21, and 14 more places -- 67.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
5:23
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
PRESENT TENSE · BAR 5

It is played on crash and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 38 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 68 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, 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 68, 79 and 90 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 Present Tense use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 67.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5, 9-17, 20-21 and 25-26, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Present Tense hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 38 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 · 121 BARS ANALYSED