FALL OUT BOY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Centuries

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 22-28, 30-36 and 38-44, and 9 more places -- 48.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
164
LENGTH
3:45
DIFFICULTY
31/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
CENTURIES · BARS 22-23

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 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 31 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 131 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 131, 153 and 175 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 Centuries use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 48.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 22-28, 30-36, 38-44 and 66-72, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Centuries hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 31 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 · 164 BARS ANALYSED