MY DYING BRIDE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Forever People

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 41-55 -- 16.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
89
LENGTH
3:55
DIFFICULTY
84/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
THE FOREVER PEOPLE · BARS 41-42

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 84 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 68 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 68, 79 and 90 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 Forever People use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 41-55. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Forever People hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 84 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 89 BARS ANALYSED