SIMPLY RED · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sunrise

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-20, 22-44 and 46-60, and 2 more places -- 95.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
84
LENGTH
3:03
DIFFICULTY
35/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
SUNRISE · BAR 3

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 35 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 83 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, and nothing else. 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 83, 96 and 110 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 Sunrise use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 95.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-20, 22-44, 46-60 and 62-64, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Sunrise hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 84 BARS ANALYSED