AGENT ORANGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bloodstains

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-20 and 29-48 -- 50% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
181 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
80
LENGTH
1:46
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 181 BPM
BLOODSTAINS · BAR 2

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 50 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 136 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 136, 158 and 181 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 Bloodstains use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 181 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-20 and 29-48. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bloodstains hard?

28 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 80 BARS ANALYSED