MASAYOSHI TAKANAKA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ready To Fly

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-6, 22-28 and 32-36, and 12 more places -- 28.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
235
LENGTH
7:22
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
READY TO FLY · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 30 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 67 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 96 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 96, 112 and 128 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 Ready To Fly use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-6, 22-28, 32-36 and 38, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ready To Fly hard?

30 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 235 BARS ANALYSED