IM · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Retfufkhk,////

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 175-180, 183-188 and 191-196, and 8 more places -- 25.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
109 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
249
LENGTH
8:40
DIFFICULTY
69/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 109 BPM
RETFUFKHK,//// · BAR 175

It is played on high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 56 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 69 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 71 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 71, 84, 96 and 109 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 Retfufkhk,//// use?

A one-bar groove on high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 109 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 175-180, 183-188, 191-196 and 199-204, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Retfufkhk,//// hard?

56 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 277 BARS ANALYSED