IMAGINE DRAGONS, ARCANE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Enemy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-21, 37 and 39, and 8 more places -- 34.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
154 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
108
LENGTH
2:48
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 154 BPM
ENEMY · BAR 6

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 4 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 41 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 116 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.

Tempo goes 116, 135 and 154 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 Enemy use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 154 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-21, 37, 39 and 41, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Enemy hard?

4 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how much of it falls off the beat the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 108 BARS ANALYSED