TOWER OF POWER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in What is hip?

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-16, 18 and 20-21, and 5 more places -- 80.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
5:12
DIFFICULTY
69/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
WHAT IS HIP? · BAR 1

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 56 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 69 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 65 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 65, 77, 88 and 100 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 is hip? use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 80.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-16, 18, 20-21 and 23, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in What is hip? hard?

56 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 132 BARS ANALYSED