SHINEDOWN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Crow & The Butterfly

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 23-31 and 49-58 -- 28.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
6/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
3:55
DIFFICULTY
25/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
THE CROW & THE BUTTERFLY · BARS 23-24

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 25 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 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride 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 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 The Crow & The Butterfly use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 6/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 23-31 and 49-58. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Crow & The Butterfly hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 25 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 · 98 BARS ANALYSED