BIG THIEF · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Shark Smile

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 35-64 and 101-106 -- 35% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
SHARK SMILE · BAR 36

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 35 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 98 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 98, 114 and 130 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 Shark Smile use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 35-64 and 101-106. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Shark Smile hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 35 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 · 106 BARS ANALYSED