HILLSONG WORSHIP · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Phenomena (DA DA)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15, 39-52 and 69-75 -- 26.8% 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
84
LENGTH
2:32
DIFFICULTY
49/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 132 BPM
PHENOMENA (DA DA) · BAR 40

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 49 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 99 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 99, 116 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 Phenomena (DA DA) use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 132 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15, 39-52 and 69-75. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Phenomena (DA DA) hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 49 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 84 BARS ANALYSED