ARCTIC MONKEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Choo Choo

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-13, 15-17 and 19-21, and 8 more places -- 29.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
145 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
3:05
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 145 BPM
CHOO CHOO · BAR 11

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 34 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 52 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 109 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 109, 127 and 145 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 Choo Choo use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 145 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-13, 15-17, 19-21 and 23-25, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Choo Choo hard?

34 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 52 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED