AS BLOOD RUNS BLACK · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Instinct

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-12, 14-16 and 18-20, and 26 more places -- 26.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
220 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
209
LENGTH
3:48
DIFFICULTY
36/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 220 BPM
INSTINCT · BAR 10

It is played on crash and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 36 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 165 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 165, 193 and 220 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 Instinct use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 4/4 at 220 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-12, 14-16, 18-20 and 22-23, and 25 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Instinct hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 36 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 · 209 BARS ANALYSED