TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Cigarettes in The Theatre

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25, 27 and 29, and 25 more places -- 44.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
169 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
3:24
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 169 BPM
CIGARETTES IN THE THEATRE · BAR 25

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 25 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 45 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 127 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. 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 127, 148 and 169 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 Cigarettes in The Theatre use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 169 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 44.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25, 27, 29 and 31, and 24 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Cigarettes in The Theatre hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED