LIVING COLOUR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Cult Of Personality

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-11, 13-16 and 19-20, and 7 more places -- 21.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
92 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
4:43
DIFFICULTY
74/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 92 BPM
CULT OF PERSONALITY · BAR 11

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 74 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 69 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. 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 69, 81 and 92 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 Cult Of Personality use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 92 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-11, 13-16, 19-20 and 23, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Cult Of Personality hard?

36 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 74 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED