BLINK-182 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dick Lips

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-7, 17-23 and 33-39, and 2 more places -- 33.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
124 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
93
LENGTH
3:00
DIFFICULTY
90/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 124 BPM
DICK LIPS · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 54 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 90 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 81 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 81, 95, 110 and 124 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 Dick Lips use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 124 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-7, 17-23, 33-39 and 49-55, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dick Lips hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 90 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 93 BARS ANALYSED