MUSE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Apocalypse Please

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 43-52 and 71-80 -- 25% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
80 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
88
LENGTH
4:24
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 80 BPM
APOCALYPSE PLEASE · BAR 44

It is played on crash, ride and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 57 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 60 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 52 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, ride 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 52, 61, 71 and 80 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 Apocalypse Please use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride and kick, in 4/4 at 80 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 43-52 and 71-80. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Apocalypse Please hard?

57 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 60 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 · 88 BARS ANALYSED