BERNARD GERVAIS BURNZ · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hsl

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 36-38, 40-42 and 44-46, and 13 more places -- 45.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
180 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
158
LENGTH
3:31
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 180 BPM
HSL · BAR 36

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 135 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 135, 158 and 180 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 Hsl use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 180 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 45.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 36-38, 40-42, 44-46 and 48-50, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hsl hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED