BRAND NEW · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Guernica

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-17 and 34-41 -- 32.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
92 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
78
LENGTH
3:23
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 92 BPM
GUERNICA · BAR 2

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 57 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 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 Guernica use?

A one-bar groove on snare, 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 32.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-17 and 34-41. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Guernica hard?

36 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 78 BARS ANALYSED