BREAKING BENJAMIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blow Me Away

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-16 and 35-40 -- 15.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
68 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
82
LENGTH
4:48
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 68 BPM
BLOW ME AWAY · BAR 12

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

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 51 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 51, 60 and 68 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 Blow Me Away use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 68 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-16 and 35-40. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Blow Me Away hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 82 BARS ANALYSED