SKILLET · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Better Than Drugs

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 29, 31 and 35, and 27 more places -- 19.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
176 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
171
LENGTH
3:53
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 176 BPM
BETTER THAN DRUGS · BAR 39

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 29 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 132 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 132, 154 and 176 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 Better Than Drugs use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 176 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 29, 31, 35 and 39, and 26 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 29 times over the song.

Is the beat in Better Than Drugs hard?

29 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 171 BARS ANALYSED