REACTION · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in 09 LONESOME KNIGHT

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-5, 11-14 and 32, and 8 more places -- 27.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
155
LENGTH
4:08
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
09 LONESOME KNIGHT · BAR 3

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 79 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 83 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 83 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 83, 99, 116, 133 and 150 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 09 LONESOME KNIGHT use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-5, 11-14, 32 and 34-37, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in 09 LONESOME KNIGHT hard?

79 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED