WINDOWSILL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in stepping off the earth

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 6-8, 10-12 and 14-16, and 6 more places -- 19.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
77 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
126
LENGTH
6:31
DIFFICULTY
95/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 77 BPM
STEPPING OFF THE EARTH · BARS 6-7

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 54 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 95 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

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 50 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 50, 59, 68 and 77 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 stepping off the earth use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 77 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-8, 10-12, 14-16 and 18-20, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in stepping off the earth hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 95 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 126 BARS ANALYSED