GREEN DAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Chump

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 67-80, 83-88 and 91-92 -- 18% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
174 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
122
LENGTH
2:47
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
CHUMP · BAR 67

It is played on high tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 51 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 70 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 113 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 113, 133, 154 and 174 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 Chump use?

A one-bar groove on high tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 67-80, 83-88 and 91-92. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Chump hard?

51 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 122 BARS ANALYSED