BILLIE EILISH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in bad guy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-27, 29-31 and 35-42, and 2 more places -- 39.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
105
LENGTH
3:07
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
BAD GUY · BAR 25

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 38 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 101 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 101, 118 and 135 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 bad guy use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-27, 29-31, 35-42 and 59-65, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in bad guy hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 38 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 · 105 BARS ANALYSED