PROJECT VANGUARD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in project2

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 41-43, 45-47 and 57-59, and 1 more place -- 17.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
210 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
68
LENGTH
1:14
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 210 BPM
PROJECT2 · BAR 41

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 33 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 83 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 158 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 158, 184 and 210 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 project2 use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 210 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 41-43, 45-47, 57-59 and 61-63. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in project2 hard?

33 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 72 BARS ANALYSED