VINDICTA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Face of the Clown

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11, 43 and 45, and 14 more places -- 15% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
88 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
127
LENGTH
5:45
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 88 BPM
THE FACE OF THE CLOWN · BAR 11

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 66 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 66 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 66, 77 and 88 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 Face of the Clown use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 88 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11, 43, 45 and 50, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Face of the Clown hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 127 BARS ANALYSED