ALEXANDROS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in [Alexandros] - Rock The World (MV)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 19-24, 59-64 and 67-72, and 11 more places -- 27.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
182 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
202
LENGTH
4:26
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 182 BPM
[ALEXANDROS] - ROCK THE WORLD (MV) · BAR 20

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 55 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 64 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 118 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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. 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.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 118, 140, 161 and 182 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 [Alexandros] - Rock The World (MV) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 182 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 19-24, 59-64, 67-72 and 105-108, and 10 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 26 times over the song.

Is the beat in [Alexandros] - Rock The World (MV) hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 64 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 202 BARS ANALYSED