A PERFECT CIRCLE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Thomas

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 58-60, 62 and 64, and 3 more places -- 15.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
86 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
74
LENGTH
3:27
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 86 BPM
THOMAS · BAR 58

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 54 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 65 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. 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 65, 75 and 86 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 Thomas use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 86 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 58-60, 62, 64 and 66-67, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Thomas hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 74 BARS ANALYSED