ED SHEERAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bad Habits (feat. Bring Me The Horizon)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 38-40, 42-44 and 80-82, and 5 more places -- 22.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
131 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
136
LENGTH
4:09
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 131 BPM
BAD HABITS (FEAT. BRING ME THE HORIZON) · BAR 38

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 47 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 98 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, and nothing else. 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 98, 115 and 131 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 Habits (feat. Bring Me The Horizon) use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 131 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 38-40, 42-44, 80-82 and 84-86, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bad Habits (feat. Bring Me The Horizon) hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 47 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 · 136 BARS ANALYSED