THE CURE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Taking Off

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-31, 49-55 and 57-63 -- 26.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
147 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
111
LENGTH
3:01
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 147 BPM
TAKING OFF · BAR 18

It is played on snare, mid tom and floor tom, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 3 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 35 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 110 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 110, 129 and 147 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 Taking Off use?

A one-bar groove on snare, mid tom and floor tom, in 4/4 at 147 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-31, 49-55 and 57-63. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Taking Off hard?

3 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 111 BARS ANALYSED