TAYLOR SWIFT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Cruel Summer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4-27, 31-39 and 46-54 -- 68.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
84 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
62
LENGTH
2:57
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 84 BPM
CRUEL SUMMER · BAR 4

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 39 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 63 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 63, 74 and 84 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 Cruel Summer use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 84 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 68.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 4-27, 31-39 and 46-54. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Cruel Summer hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 62 BARS ANALYSED