CODE ORANGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Swallowing the Rabbit Whole

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-16, 37-51 and 77-92 -- 37.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
125
LENGTH
3:19
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
SWALLOWING THE RABBIT WHOLE · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 31 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 57 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 113 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 113, 131 and 150 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 Swallowing the Rabbit Whole use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-16, 37-51 and 77-92. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Swallowing the Rabbit Whole hard?

31 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 125 BARS ANALYSED