LUKE COMBS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Beer Never Broke My Heart

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-10, 27-40 and 42-44, and 8 more places -- 70.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
154 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
119
LENGTH
3:05
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 154 BPM
BEER NEVER BROKE MY HEART · BAR 4

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 37 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 116 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 116, 135 and 154 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 Beer Never Broke My Heart use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 154 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 70.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-10, 27-40, 42-44 and 46-51, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Beer Never Broke My Heart hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 119 BARS ANALYSED