LEPROUS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Price

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-11, 13-19 and 21-27, and 2 more places -- 18.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
152 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
189
LENGTH
4:58
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 152 BPM
THE PRICE · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 58 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 83 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 99 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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, hi-hat 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 99, 117, 134 and 152 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 Price use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 152 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-11, 13-19, 21-27 and 93-99, and 1 more place. 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 Price hard?

58 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 189 BARS ANALYSED