MUSE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Sickness In You & I

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-11, 13 and 15, and 8 more places -- 20.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
93 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
86
LENGTH
3:41
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 93 BPM
THE SICKNESS IN YOU & I · BAR 25

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 25 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 73 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 70 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 70, 81 and 93 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 Sickness In You & I use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 93 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-11, 13, 15 and 25, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Sickness In You & I hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 86 BARS ANALYSED