BLONDIE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rapture (Remastered 2001)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 58-60, 62-64 and 66, and 7 more places -- 53.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
108 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
161
LENGTH
5:54
DIFFICULTY
49/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 108 BPM
RAPTURE (REMASTERED 2001) · BAR 58

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 38 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 49 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 81 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. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 81, 95 and 108 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 Rapture (Remastered 2001) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 108 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 53.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 58-60, 62-64, 66 and 68-74, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Rapture (Remastered 2001) hard?

38 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 how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 161 BARS ANALYSED