Blast Beat Tempo Calculator

Attempting to play at two-hundred beats per minute will require looking beyond the tempo alone. The tempo alone doesn’t tell you anything about physical effort required to hit that amount of beats per second. What I mean by this is that two-hundred beats per minute isn’t going to tell you how many times you has to hit a drumhead with your hand.

Take a moment and pull out a calculator, translate those complex numbers into concrete rates of physical exertion. Doing this lets you break it down and know precisely what your body parts will be expected to do. Blasting away at speed is one thing and playing cleanly at speed is another. The former is a burst of adrenaline while the latter are a test of your structural integrity in your shins and wrists.

Why Counting Strokes Helps You Play Faster Drums

At two hundred beats per minute a basic sixteen note subdivision is equal to eight hundred strokes per minute by your hands alone. Add in double bass pedals that kick out eighth notes and now you’re striking out at four hundred more with your feet. The choice of style preset sets the baseline of limb interaction. On a traditional alternating blast, your hands stays evenly timed but a bomb blast has both hands striking together each beat. This immediately doubles the hand factor.

On paper it might sound small but hit a snare and hi hat together full force nine hundred times a minute. Within seconds your shoulder tension will be through the roof. You can tweak all this stuff with tool and make it play like you’re learning the song, at exactly its density. If you are practicing a gravity blast where your lead hand do more work, tweaking the share percentage reveals just how lopsided that fatigue becomes.

The bottleneck of extreme drumming isn’t solely raw speed, but rather ability to endure. Sure, maybe you can maintains a hyperblast for five seconds without losing form. But how many? How long can you sustain that until fatigue set in? The duration input provides an estimate of total clean strokes within a certain time frame to help you see phrase load. Since real songs breathe, it also factors in rests. It include stops and starts.

What happens when you ignore the breaks during your practice? You end up with inaccurate endurance expectations. And then you’re on a take and suddenly you fail because your grip gave out at measure forty-two from cumulative fatigue you never planned for. It also considers accuracy. You can set the clean note percentage so it accounts for human error. Pros miss notes when they play realy fast on long blast passages too.

The calculator takes this into account, and final stroke count is based off reaching a realistic goal rather than theoretical perfection. This is a good test to realize that playing loud isn’t necessarily the same thing than playing precisely. The second factor is the choice of subdivision. At any given pace, sextuplets feel much quicker than sixteenth notes. That’s because there are more events per beat in the sextuplets, plus you have to exert far more precise motor control over your playing.

The table on this page breaks down the rates so you can compare them side by side. You’ll notice that if the drummer wants something fast but isn’t prepared to play with mechanical precision of thirty-second notes then they’ll swap to triplets. Finally, err on the side of caution. The control margin function provides an additional percentage buffer over your intended tempo. This is essential during a recording session.

You should of be able to play two hundred and ten in the practice room so you can comfortabley play two hundred on tape. An additional five percent will relax you when it matters, as relaxation is key to increasing speed. Tension kills. Having precise knowledge about your stroke rates empowers you to know how far you can go, when you can push and when you really do have some room to spare. Panic becomes planning.