COLLECTIVE SOUL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Where The River Flows

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-8, 13-16 and 21-24, and 8 more places -- 41.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
113
LENGTH
3:32
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
WHERE THE RIVER FLOWS · BARS 5-6

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 57 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 96 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 96, 112 and 128 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 Where The River Flows use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-8, 13-16, 21-24 and 33-36, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Where The River Flows hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 113 BARS ANALYSED