BRYAN ADAMS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Run To You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-30, 56-64 and 91-93, and 3 more places -- 29.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
4:08
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
RUN TO YOU · BAR 28

It is played on ride, 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 the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 96 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, ride 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 96, 112 and 128 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 To You use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-30, 56-64, 91-93 and 95-100, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Run To You hard?

30 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 132 BARS ANALYSED