B'Z · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Change The Future

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2, 4-26 and 29-35, and 5 more places -- 87.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
99 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
95
LENGTH
3:48
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 99 BPM
CHANGE THE FUTURE · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 63 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 73 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 64 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, 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 64, 76, 87 and 99 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 Change The Future use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 99 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 87.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2, 4-26, 29-35 and 38-56, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Change The Future hard?

63 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 95 BARS ANALYSED