MELISSA AUF DER MAUR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Taste You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 35-41, 43-49 and 51-53, and 4 more places -- 69.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
131 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
120
LENGTH
3:40
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 131 BPM
TASTE YOU · BAR 51

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 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 50 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 98 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. 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 98, 115 and 131 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 Taste You use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 131 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 69.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 35-41, 43-49, 51-53 and 63-69, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Taste You hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 120 BARS ANALYSED