BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The River

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 87-93, 95-117 and 119-126 -- 31.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
112 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
126
LENGTH
4:30
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
THE RIVER · BAR 88

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 29 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 47 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 84 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, ride 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 84, 98 and 112 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 The River use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 87-93, 95-117 and 119-126. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in The River hard?

29 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 47 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 · 126 BARS ANALYSED