DECEMBER AVENUE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bulong (Original)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15-38, 56-61 and 141-145 -- 30.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
BULONG (ORIGINAL) · BAR 16

It is played on hi-hat and snare, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 37 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 101 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 101, 118 and 135 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 Bulong (Original) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and snare, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15-38, 56-61 and 141-145. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bulong (Original) hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 145 BARS ANALYSED