DEHUMANIZING ITATRAIN WORSHIP · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Brutal rush (ai)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 14-20, 22-28 and 42-48, and 3 more places -- 32% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
128
LENGTH
3:50
DIFFICULTY
88/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
BRUTAL RUSH (AI) · BAR 14

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 55 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 88 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 85 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, and nothing else. 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 85, 100, 115 and 130 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 Brutal rush (ai) use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 14-20, 22-28, 42-48 and 105-110, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Brutal rush (ai) hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 88 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 128 BARS ANALYSED