BLØF · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blauwe Ruis

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-31, 49-67 and 97-111 -- 39.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
4:36
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
BLAUWE RUIS · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 56 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 94 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.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 94, 109 and 125 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 Blauwe Ruis use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-31, 49-67 and 97-111. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Blauwe Ruis hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 56 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 144 BARS ANALYSED