LADY GAGA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bad Romance

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-9, 14-33 and 58-73 -- 32% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
4:42
DIFFICULTY
30/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
BAD ROMANCE · BAR 15

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 30 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Romance use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-9, 14-33 and 58-73. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bad Romance hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 30 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 · 141 BARS ANALYSED