COYOTE THEORY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in This Side of Paradise

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 65-84 and 113-123 -- 28.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
158 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
125
LENGTH
2:38
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 158 BPM
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE · BAR 65

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 62 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 119 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 119, 138 and 158 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 This Side of Paradise use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 3/4 at 158 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 65-84 and 113-123. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in This Side of Paradise hard?

44 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 125 BARS ANALYSED