HOLDING ABSENCE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Angel In The Marble

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 117-122, 131 and 134-135, and 8 more places -- 15.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
87 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
172
LENGTH
5:56
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 87 BPM
THE ANGEL IN THE MARBLE · BAR 119

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 38 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 55 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 65 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 65, 76 and 87 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 The Angel In The Marble use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 3/4 at 87 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 117-122, 131, 134-135 and 137-139, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Angel In The Marble hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 172 BARS ANALYSED