IMAGINE DRAGONS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bad Liar

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-19, 45-51 and 53-59 -- 38.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
89 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
91
LENGTH
4:05
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 89 BPM
BAD LIAR · BAR 13

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 1 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 39 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 67 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 67, 78 and 89 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 Liar use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 89 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-19, 45-51 and 53-59. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bad Liar hard?

1 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 91 BARS ANALYSED