PLACEBO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Song To Say Goodbye

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-24 and 49-72 -- 34.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
3:25
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
SONG TO SAY GOODBYE · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 45 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 124 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 124, 144 and 165 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 Song To Say Goodbye use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-24 and 49-72. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Song To Say Goodbye hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 141 BARS ANALYSED