BLACKPINK · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in ‘Champion’

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 9-24 and 41-56 -- 33.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
2:48
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
‘CHAMPION’ · BARS 9-10

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 41 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 120 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 120, 140 and 160 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 ‘Champion’ use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-24 and 41-56. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in ‘Champion’ hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 41 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 · 112 BARS ANALYSED