DEAD BY SUNRISE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Walking In Circles

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 43-45, 47-49 and 51-53, and 22 more places -- 31.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
132 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
208
LENGTH
4:44
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 132 BPM
WALKING IN CIRCLES · BAR 43

It is played on crash, hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 48 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 99 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 99, 116 and 132 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 Walking In Circles use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat and kick, in 3/4 at 132 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 43-45, 47-49, 51-53 and 55-57, and 21 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Walking In Circles hard?

28 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 208 BARS ANALYSED