NEON TREES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Everybody Talks

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-27, 29-33 and 48-54, and 13 more places -- 42.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
155 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
115
LENGTH
2:57
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 155 BPM
EVERYBODY TALKS · BAR 22

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 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 47 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.

  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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 116, 136 and 155 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 Everybody Talks use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 155 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 42.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-27, 29-33, 48-54 and 56-60, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Everybody Talks hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 47 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 · 115 BARS ANALYSED