ROBIN CALLAWAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Seraphim Part III

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 50-115 and 118 -- 55.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
193 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
2:30
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 193 BPM
SERAPHIM PART III · BAR 50

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 42 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 145 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 145, 169 and 193 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 Seraphim Part III use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 193 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 55.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 50-115 and 118. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Seraphim Part III hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 121 BARS ANALYSED