DIAMOND HEAD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Helpless 2020 ai

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5-7, and 33 more places -- 33.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
211
LENGTH
6:56
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
HELPLESS 2020 AI · BAR 3

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 68 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 78 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 78, 92, 106 and 120 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 Helpless 2020 ai use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 5-7 and 9-11, and 32 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Helpless 2020 ai hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 211 BARS ANALYSED