ARCTIC MONKEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Fluorescent Adolescent

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-4, 32 and 50-51, and 2 more places -- 18.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
112 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
79
LENGTH
2:49
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
FLUORESCENT ADOLESCENT · BAR 1

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 67 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 84 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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 84, 98 and 112 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 Fluorescent Adolescent use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-4, 32, 50-51 and 53-55, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Fluorescent Adolescent hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 79 BARS ANALYSED