HILLSONG YOUNG AND FREE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Wake

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-24, 49-56 and 89-96, and 1 more place -- 33.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
131 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
4:24
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 131 BPM
WAKE · BAR 1

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 40 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 98 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.

Tempo goes 98, 115 and 131 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 Wake use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 131 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-24, 49-56, 89-96 and 137-144. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Wake hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED