TIGERS JAW · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Spirit Desire

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-55, 57-80 and 97-120, and 1 more place -- 67.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
112 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
5:09
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
SPIRIT DESIRE · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 51 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 63 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 73 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 73, 86, 99 and 112 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 Spirit Desire use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 67.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-55, 57-80, 97-120 and 137-143. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Spirit Desire hard?

51 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 63 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED