GROUPLOVE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Tongue Tied

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-13, 17 and 23-26, and 9 more places -- 47.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
113 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
94
LENGTH
3:20
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 113 BPM
TONGUE TIED · BAR 68

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 38 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 85 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, and nothing else. 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 85, 99 and 113 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 Tongue Tied use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 113 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 47.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-13, 17, 23-26 and 29-32, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Tongue Tied hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 38 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 · 94 BARS ANALYSED