ALTERNATIVE COMPETITION 2 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in It's Just A Game

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-16, 18-32 and 34-40, and 6 more places -- 88.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
134 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
3:21
DIFFICULTY
27/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 134 BPM
IT'S JUST A GAME · BAR 9

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 11 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 27 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 101 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 101, 117 and 134 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 It's Just A Game use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 134 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 88.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-16, 18-32, 34-40 and 42-56, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in It's Just A Game hard?

11 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 27 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 · 112 BARS ANALYSED