JOEL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in tuffisaurus

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-38 and 77-90 -- 16.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
215
LENGTH
6:10
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
TUFFISAURUS · BAR 17

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 73 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 105 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 105, 123 and 140 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 tuffisaurus use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-38 and 77-90. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in tuffisaurus hard?

28 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 216 BARS ANALYSED