SICK OF IT ALL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Scratch The Surface

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 17-23, 29-35 and 57-63, and 1 more place -- 25% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
174 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
2:33
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
SCRATCH THE SURFACE · BARS 17-18

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 33 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 45 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 131 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 131, 152 and 174 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 Scratch The Surface use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 29-35, 57-63 and 69-75. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Scratch The Surface hard?

33 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 112 BARS ANALYSED