ANAKREENSKYRIDER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in What A Mess

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 50-65, 107-108 and 111-112, and 4 more places -- 23.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
243
LENGTH
8:06
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
WHAT A MESS · BARS 50-51

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 50 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 90 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. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 and 120 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 What A Mess use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 50-65, 107-108, 111-112 and 115-116, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in What A Mess hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 243 BARS ANALYSED