LD-50 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Dope Fein

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 58, 60-62 and 64-66, and 14 more places -- 21.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
234
LENGTH
8:31
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
THE DOPE FEIN · BARS 60-61

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 40 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 68 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 83 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 83, 96 and 110 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 Dope Fein use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 58, 60-62, 64-66 and 68-70, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Dope Fein hard?

40 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 234 BARS ANALYSED