MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Cemetery Drive

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-3, 5-8 and 10-11, and 3 more places -- 33.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
116 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
89
LENGTH
3:04
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 116 BPM
CEMETERY DRIVE · BAR 2

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 68 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 87 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 87, 102 and 116 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 Cemetery Drive use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 116 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-3, 5-8, 10-11 and 13-19, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Cemetery Drive hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 89 BARS ANALYSED