BILLY IDOL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dancing With Myself

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-68, 70-76 and 78-83, and 11 more places -- 90.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
178 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
213
LENGTH
4:47
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 178 BPM
DANCING WITH MYSELF · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 63 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 134 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 134, 156 and 178 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 Dancing With Myself use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 178 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 90.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-68, 70-76, 78-83 and 86-97, and 10 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dancing With Myself hard?

44 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 63 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 · 213 BARS ANALYSED