БРАВО · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blues de Moscou

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 7-10, 19-20 and 46-48, and 2 more places -- 29% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
63
LENGTH
1:48
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
BLUES DE MOSCOU · BAR 8

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 45 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 53 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 105 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. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 105, 123 and 140 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 Blues de Moscou use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7-10, 19-20, 46-48 and 51-53, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Blues de Moscou hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 63 BARS ANALYSED