BEATSTEAKS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hand In Hand

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-12, 14-21 and 57-64, and 1 more place -- 34.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
92
LENGTH
2:35
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
HAND IN HAND · BAR 5

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 52 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 105 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 105, 123 and 140 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 Hand In Hand use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-12, 14-21, 57-64 and 66-73. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hand In Hand hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 52 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 · 92 BARS ANALYSED