ARCTIC MONKEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in 505

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-36 and 53-67 -- 41.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
117
LENGTH
3:21
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
505 · BAR 5

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 15 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 46 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 105 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 105, 123 and 140 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 505 use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-36 and 53-67. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in 505 hard?

15 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 46 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 117 BARS ANALYSED