THE EAGLES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Victim Of Love

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 14-16, 18-20 and 22-24, and 6 more places -- 31.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
83 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
86
LENGTH
4:06
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 83 BPM
VICTIM OF LOVE · BARS 14-15

It is played on crash, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 37 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 62 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 62, 73 and 83 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 Victim Of Love use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 83 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 14-16, 18-20, 22-24 and 35-37, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Victim Of Love hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 86 BARS ANALYSED