LOATHE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Way It Breaks

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15, 17 and 31, and 9 more places -- 22.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
113 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
117
LENGTH
4:08
DIFFICULTY
33/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 113 BPM
THE WAY IT BREAKS · BAR 71

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 14 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 33 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 85 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, 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 85, 99 and 113 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 Way It Breaks use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 113 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15, 17, 31 and 33, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Way It Breaks hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 33 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 117 BARS ANALYSED