HONNINGBARNA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Schäfer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 34-39, 43-46 and 48-50, and 1 more place -- 20.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
95
LENGTH
2:17
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
SCHÄFER · BAR 34

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 53 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 124 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 124, 144 and 165 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 Schäfer use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 34-39, 43-46, 48-50 and 52-54. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Schäfer hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 95 BARS ANALYSED