ALEX G · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Gnaw

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-21, 24-30 and 32, and 1 more place -- 50% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
67
LENGTH
2:41
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
GNAW · BAR 6

It is played on snare and floor tom, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 38 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 75 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 75, 88 and 100 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 Gnaw use?

A one-bar groove on snare and floor tom, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-21, 24-30, 32 and 34-38. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Gnaw hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 38 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 · 67 BARS ANALYSED