GREEN DAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in 21 Guns (Drum)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15, 19-20 and 41, and 9 more places -- 32.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
70 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
96
LENGTH
5:29
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 70 BPM
21 GUNS (DRUM) · BAR 15

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 39 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 53 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. 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, and nothing else. 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 53, 61 and 70 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 21 Guns (Drum) use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 70 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15, 19-20, 41 and 45-47, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 21 times over the song.

Is the beat in 21 Guns (Drum) hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 39 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 · 96 BARS ANALYSED