Transcribing Notes From John Neil (Head Transcriber)
Head Over Heels – Tears for Fears – Song Breakdown
Drum Sheet Music
Ahh, the good ole’ days of drum machines and electronic chips and such. This was programmed on probably either an E-mu Drumulator or a LinnDrum. Though being a 1985 release, there is a chance it might have been programmed on a computer playing the drum machine, but I’m guessing it was programmed in the drum machine itself, based on the re-use of drum fills etc.
In that era, people were getting pretty clever and resourceful on ways to sequence drums. Thomas Dolby actually used Tangerine Dream’s old light show box to program the drums for his early stuff (the size of a refrigerator).
And judging from the sounds on this album, I’d say a Fairlight CMI was used, which contains a sequencer in itself. Ahh, the 80’s :).
Anyhow, it was pretty easy to adapt this to normal drums, as it was programmed with a normal drummer in mind … no more than 2 arms or feet at once etc. With of course the exception of an added hi -hat in verse 2 that plays constant 8th notes, but that’s just icing on the cake. A pretty basic beat, with some nice drum fills.
Also, in fills like bar 82, it sounds like there could be drags leading up to some snare hits. This is actually backwards reverb put on the snare. To do this, they most likely turned the whole multi-track tape over, played it the other way (backwards), and put the backwards snare into a reverb chamber, or reverb effect, recorded that signal onto a different track, then turned the tape over the normal way. So now the tail end of the reverb comes before the snare hit. They do this in other places as well (such as the 2 bar fill before the bridge), with different lengths of reverb. This is stuff that happened a lot when the Beatles were playing in the studio in the later 60’s, and maybe somebody was doing it even before that.
