THE SURFARIS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Wipe Out

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-19 and 69-78 -- 25.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
162 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
2:38
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 162 BPM
WIPE OUT · BAR 3

It is played on the mid tom, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 39 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 122 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.

Tempo goes 122, 142 and 162 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 Wipe Out use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom, in 4/4 at 162 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-19 and 69-78. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Wipe Out hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how many notes a second it asks for the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 106 BARS ANALYSED