SWEET · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ballroom Blitz

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-8, 10-13 and 16-17, and 4 more places -- 25.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
112 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
4:00
DIFFICULTY
84/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
BALLROOM BLITZ · BAR 2

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 62 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 84 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 73 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 73, 86, 99 and 112 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 Ballroom Blitz use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-8, 10-13, 16-17 and 20-24, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ballroom Blitz hard?

62 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 84 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED