THE OH HELLOS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Soldier, Poet, King

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-15, 19-26 and 29, and 5 more places -- 31.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
85
LENGTH
3:23
DIFFICULTY
23/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
SOLDIER, POET, KING · BAR 10

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 23 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Soldier, Poet, King use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-15, 19-26, 29 and 32, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Soldier, Poet, King hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 23 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 85 BARS ANALYSED