BRUNO MARS FT ANDERSON PAAK · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in After Last Night

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18, 20 and 22, and 23 more places -- 38.3% 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
143
LENGTH
4:04
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
AFTER LAST NIGHT · BAR 20

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 33 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  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 After Last Night use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18, 20, 22 and 24, and 22 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in After Last Night hard?

33 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. 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 · 143 BARS ANALYSED