THE CURE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Three Imaginary Boys

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.

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

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
THREE IMAGINARY BOYS · BAR 9

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 25 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 120 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.

Tempo goes 120, 140 and 160 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 Three Imaginary Boys use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 73.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-11, 13-15, 17-19 and 21-23, and 26 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Three Imaginary Boys hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 25 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 · 133 BARS ANALYSED