KEVIN MACLEOD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Shiny tech

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-15, 58-62 and 73-77, and 1 more place -- 26.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
128
LENGTH
3:39
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
SHINY TECH · BAR 11

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 69 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 68 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 91 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 91, 107, 124 and 140 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 Shiny tech use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-15, 58-62, 73-77 and 104-118. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Shiny tech hard?

69 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 128 BARS ANALYSED