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Three Imaginary Boys · The Cure

EXERCISE 1 OF 6
Groove C -- Chorus
0 / 133 BARS COVERED
0 / 6 PASSED · 90 BARS LIT · IN THE CHORUS, OUTRO
COUNT-IN
CHORUS
OUTRO
3 groovesCS1S3Fill into the next barFill that ends a sectionInto the next partStop / hitRest
GROOVE · 2
RUN · 1
JOIN · 1
SECTION · 1
WHOLE SONG · 1
ABOUT THIS DRUM PART

How to play Three Imaginary Boys on drums

133 bars at 160 BPM -- fast, and 3:20 of it without a break -- on crash, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick.

25 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
133
LENGTH
3:20
DIFFICULTY
25/100

silence through bars 1-8, snare through bars 9-80, silence through bars 81-84 and snare through bars 85-133.

The beat

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-11, 13-15 and 17-19, and 27 more places -- 73.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

    9
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
SD |--------x-------|
BD |x---x-----------|
Three Imaginary Boys -- the groove · x hit · o open hi-hat · g ghost note · r cross-stick · X accent

The fills

There are no fills to speak of: the part holds one beat the whole way through.

What the course does

It cuts the song into 5 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. The grooves the song is built on -- C -- 5 exercises, about 28 minutes.
  2. The whole song -- 1 exercise, about 10 minutes.
START THE COURSE ↑

Questions

What BPM is Three Imaginary Boys?

160 BPM, in 4/4, with the time kept in sixteenth notes. At that speed the sixteenth notes are the whole difficulty, so the room will take it down to a quarter of it and climb back.

Is Three Imaginary Boys hard to play on drums?

25 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it. The beat itself is 0 out of 100; the rest of the number is everything around it.

How long is the drum part?

133 bars, about 3:20 at the written tempo. The course breaks it into 5 exercises over 2 sittings, about 19 minutes each.

What do I need on the kit?

crash, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick. That is most of a full kit; the part moves around it rather than sitting in one place.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 133 BARS ANALYSED