TIMMY TRUMPET · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Freaks

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-16, 25-30 and 36-40, and 3 more places -- 50.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
88
LENGTH
2:45
DIFFICULTY
21/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
FREAKS · BAR 9

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 21 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 96 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.

Tempo goes 96, 112 and 128 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 Freaks use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-16, 25-30, 36-40 and 58-60, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in Freaks hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 21 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 88 BARS ANALYSED