DIO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Don't Talk To Strangers

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 65, 67 and 69-70, and 8 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
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
148
LENGTH
5:23
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS · BARS 73-74

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 49 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 59 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 83 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, ride 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 83, 96 and 110 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 Don't Talk To Strangers use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 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 65, 67, 69-70 and 73-75, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Don't Talk To Strangers hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 148 BARS ANALYSED