ATREYU · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ain't Love Grand

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-11 and 109-137 -- 20.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
212 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
196
LENGTH
3:31
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 212 BPM
AIN'T LOVE GRAND · BARS 1-2

It is played on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 65 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

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 159 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 159, 186 and 212 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 Ain't Love Grand use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 212 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-11 and 109-137. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ain't Love Grand hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 196 BARS ANALYSED