AMERICAN FOOTBALL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bad Moons

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-45, 96-98 and 120-139, and 2 more places -- 30.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
136 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
260
LENGTH
7:39
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 136 BPM
BAD MOONS · BAR 13

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 4 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 61 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 102 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.

Tempo goes 102, 119 and 136 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 Moons use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 136 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-45, 96-98, 120-139 and 168-171, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bad Moons hard?

4 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 260 BARS ANALYSED