LOS HERMANOS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Último Romance

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-32 and 60-91 -- 38.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
168
LENGTH
4:04
DIFFICULTY
34/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
ÚLTIMO ROMANCE · BAR 2

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 11 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 34 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 124 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, and nothing else. 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 124, 144 and 165 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 Último Romance use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-32 and 60-91. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Último Romance hard?

11 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 34 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 · 168 BARS ANALYSED