ITCHYWORMS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Gusto ko lamang sa buhay (full)

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-10, 37-39 and 67-77, and 10 more places -- 46.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
146 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
170
LENGTH
4:37
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 146 BPM
GUSTO KO LAMANG SA BUHAY (FULL) · BARS 9-10

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 38 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 53 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 110 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 110, 128 and 146 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 Gusto ko lamang sa buhay (full) use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 146 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 46.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-10, 37-39, 67-77 and 81-82, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Gusto ko lamang sa buhay (full) hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 170 BARS ANALYSED