INSIDE JOKE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Year of the Horse

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 11, and 27 more places -- 16.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
240 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
180
LENGTH
2:56
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 240 BPM
YEAR OF THE HORSE · BAR 13

It is played on hi-hat, snare 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 speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 70 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 180 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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 180, 210 and 240 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 Year of the Horse use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 240 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 11 and 13, and 26 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Year of the Horse hard?

28 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 184 BARS ANALYSED