BAD OMENS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in CONCRETE JUNGLE

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 9-11 and 33-35, and 1 more place -- 20% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
92 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
70
LENGTH
3:03
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 92 BPM
CONCRETE JUNGLE · BAR 6

It is played on high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 54 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 69 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 69, 81 and 92 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 CONCRETE JUNGLE use?

A one-bar groove on high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 92 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9-11, 33-35 and 37-39. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in CONCRETE JUNGLE hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 70 BARS ANALYSED