BLOC PARTY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ratchet

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23 and 41-55 -- 20.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
RATCHET · BAR 17

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 30 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 66 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 104 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 104, 121 and 138 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 Ratchet use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23 and 41-55. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ratchet hard?

30 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED