CAGE THE ELEPHANT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Back Against The Wall

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-16, 25-32 and 49-60 -- 35.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
101
LENGTH
3:40
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
BACK AGAINST THE WALL · BARS 9-10

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 44 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 83 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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 83, 96 and 110 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 Back Against The Wall use?

A 2-bar phrase on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-16, 25-32 and 49-60. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Back Against The Wall hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 101 BARS ANALYSED