GOLDEN EARRING · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Radar Love

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-47 and 71-96 -- 21.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
300
LENGTH
10:25
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
RADAR LOVE · BAR 83

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 14 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 57 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 86 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 86, 101 and 115 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 Radar Love use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-47 and 71-96. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Radar Love hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 300 BARS ANALYSED