SELAH SUE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in This World

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-8, 10-15 and 17-24, and 7 more places -- 55.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
134 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
149
LENGTH
4:27
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 134 BPM
THIS WORLD · BAR 3

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 32 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 101 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. 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 101, 117 and 134 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 World use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 134 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 55.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-8, 10-15, 17-24 and 26-31, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in This World hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 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 · 149 BARS ANALYSED