FALL OUT BOY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Calm Before The Storm

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23, 25-31 and 81-87, and 1 more place -- 15.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
190 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
197
LENGTH
4:09
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 190 BPM
CALM BEFORE THE STORM · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 56 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 67 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 124 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 124, 146, 168 and 190 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 Calm Before The Storm use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 190 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 25-31, 81-87 and 89-95. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Calm Before The Storm hard?

56 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 197 BARS ANALYSED