TAYLOR SWIFT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blank Space

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-24, 27-32 and 53-58, and 3 more places -- 59.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
96 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
92
LENGTH
3:50
DIFFICULTY
19/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 96 BPM
BLANK SPACE · BAR 11

It is played on the crash, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 2 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 19 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 72 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 72, 84 and 96 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 Blank Space use?

A one-bar groove on crash, in 4/4 at 96 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-24, 27-32, 53-58 and 61-66, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Blank Space hard?

2 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 19 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 92 BARS ANALYSED