HER LAST SIGHT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Die With A Smile Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars cover

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 41, 43 and 45, and 33 more places -- 18.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
157 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
203
LENGTH
3:53
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 157 BPM
DIE WITH A SMILE LADY GAGA, BRUNO MARS COVER · BAR 109

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 42 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 61 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 118 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. 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, and nothing else. 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 118, 137 and 157 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 Die With A Smile Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars cover use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 3/4 at 157 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 41, 43, 45 and 47, and 32 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Die With A Smile Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars cover hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 203 BARS ANALYSED