BLINK-182 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ghost on the Dance Floor

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 73-87, 125-139 and 141-155, and 5 more places -- 33% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
206 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
220
LENGTH
4:16
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 206 BPM
GHOST ON THE DANCE FLOOR · BAR 74

It is played on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 40 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 68 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 155 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 155, 180 and 206 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 Ghost on the Dance Floor use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 206 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 73-87, 125-139, 141-155 and 181-195, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ghost on the Dance Floor hard?

40 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 220 BARS ANALYSED