PINK FLOYD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Scream Thy Last Scream

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 23-25, 33-42 and 47-67, and 1 more place -- 33% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
118
LENGTH
5:15
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
SCREAM THY LAST SCREAM · BAR 34

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 26 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 46 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 68 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 68, 79 and 90 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 Scream Thy Last Scream use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 23-25, 33-42, 47-67 and 85-88. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Scream Thy Last Scream hard?

26 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 46 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 · 118 BARS ANALYSED