MYLES SMITH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Stargazing

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-20, 29-36 and 38-45, and 1 more place -- 81.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
124 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
77
LENGTH
2:29
DIFFICULTY
9/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 124 BPM
STARGAZING · BAR 13

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 9 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 93 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 93, 109 and 124 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 Stargazing use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 124 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 81.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-20, 29-36, 38-45 and 54-77. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Stargazing hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 9 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how little of it repeats.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 77 BARS ANALYSED