NINE INCH NAILS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ruiner

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-40, 65-80 and 113-144 -- 49.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
118 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
4:53
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 118 BPM
RUINER · BAR 25

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 54 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 89 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.

Tempo goes 89, 103 and 118 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 Ruiner use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 118 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 49.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-40, 65-80 and 113-144. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ruiner hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED