CONVERGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hum of Hurt

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-15, 17-19 and 21-23, and 6 more places -- 32.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
172
LENGTH
3:26
DIFFICULTY
79/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
HUM OF HURT · BAR 2

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 51 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 79 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

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 98 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 98, 115, 133 and 150 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 Hum of Hurt use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 3/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-15, 17-19, 21-23 and 25-27, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 23 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hum of Hurt hard?

51 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 79 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 172 BARS ANALYSED