CAR SEAT HEADREST · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Nervous Young Inhumans

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-17, 38-52 and 73-88 -- 26.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
132 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
175
LENGTH
5:20
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 132 BPM
NERVOUS YOUNG INHUMANS · BAR 4

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 64 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 86 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 86, 101, 117 and 132 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 Nervous Young Inhumans use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 132 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-17, 38-52 and 73-88. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Nervous Young Inhumans hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 64 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 175 BARS ANALYSED