PENDULUM · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Fountain

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10, 12 and 14, and 67 more places -- 37.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
174 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
209
LENGTH
4:48
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
THE FOUNTAIN · BAR 10

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 49 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 57 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 131 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 131, 152 and 174 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 Fountain use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10, 12, 14 and 16, and 66 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Fountain hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 209 BARS ANALYSED