BOB DYLAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hurricane

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 9-15 and 21-25, and 18 more places -- 41.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
114 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
286
LENGTH
10:02
DIFFICULTY
81/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 114 BPM
HURRICANE · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 65 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 81 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 74 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 74, 87, 101 and 114 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 Hurricane use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 114 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9-15, 21-25 and 28-30, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 38 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hurricane hard?

65 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 81 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 286 BARS ANALYSED