KALEO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Break my baby

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-7, 16 and 33-40, and 4 more places -- 31.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
148 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
160
LENGTH
4:19
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 148 BPM
BREAK MY BABY · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 10 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 51 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 111 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 111, 130 and 148 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 Break my baby use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 148 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-7, 16, 33-40 and 55-60, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in Break my baby hard?

10 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 160 BARS ANALYSED