BLUES TRAVELER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Run Around

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 20-25, 38-42 and 62-82, and 4 more places -- 33.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
152 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
176
LENGTH
4:38
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 152 BPM
RUN AROUND · BARS 20-21

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 the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 51 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 114 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. 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 114, 133 and 152 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 Run Around use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 152 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 20-25, 38-42, 62-82 and 84-97, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Run Around hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 176 BARS ANALYSED