DYING WISH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Prey for me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-17 and 43-45 -- 22.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
178 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
83
LENGTH
1:53
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 178 BPM
PREY FOR ME · BAR 10

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 49 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 59 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 134 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 134, 156 and 178 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 Prey for me use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 178 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-17 and 43-45. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Prey for me hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 83 BARS ANALYSED