JENNIE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in start a war

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 3-30, 35-44 and 47-70 -- 89.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
86
LENGTH
2:41
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
START A WAR · BARS 3-4

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 42 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 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. 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 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 start a war use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 89.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-30, 35-44 and 47-70. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in start a war hard?

42 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 · 86 BARS ANALYSED