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Purple Rain · Prince

EXERCISE 4 OF 9
Groove D (a two-bar phrase)
78 / 94 BARS COVERED
0 / 9 PASSED · 12 BARS LIT · IN THE OUTRO
OUTRO
VERSE
3 groovesCGS1Fill into the next barFill that ends a sectionInto the next partStop / hitRest
GROOVE · 3
RUN · 1
JOIN · 1
LINK · 1
SECTION · 2
WHOLE SONG · 1
ABOUT THIS DRUM PART

How to play Purple Rain on drums

94 bars, 6:17, at 58 BPM: slow enough that every note is exposed. Crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick and nothing else.

51 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO
58 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
94
LENGTH
6:17
DIFFICULTY
51/100

silence through bars 1-4 and hi-hat through bars 5-94.

The beat

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-11, 14-20 and 24-29, and 3 more places -- 45.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

    17
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
HH |x-g-x-g-x-g-x-o-|
SD |----x-------x---|
BD |----x-------x---|
Purple Rain -- the groove · x hit · o open hi-hat · g ghost note · r cross-stick · X accent

The fills

There are no fills to speak of: the part holds one beat the whole way through.

What the course does

It cuts the song into 8 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. The grooves the song is built on -- C, G -- 3 exercises, about 30 minutes.
  2. Through the Outro and the Verse -- 4 exercises, about 27 minutes. Open above.
  3. The whole song -- 2 exercises, about 14 minutes.
START THE COURSE ↑

Questions

What BPM is Purple Rain?

58 BPM, in 4/4, with the time kept in sixteenth notes. Slow enough to hear every mistake, which is why the room lets you sit at the written tempo rather than under it.

Is Purple Rain hard to play on drums?

51 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet. The beat itself is 27 out of 100; the rest of the number is everything around it.

How long is the drum part?

94 bars, about 6:17 at the written tempo. The course breaks it into 8 exercises over 3 sittings, about 24 minutes each.

What do I need on the kit?

crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick. That is most of a full kit; the part moves around it rather than sitting in one place.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 94 BARS ANALYSED