YEAH YEAH YEAHS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Heads Will Roll

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-32, 73-75 and 77, and 2 more places -- 27.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
132 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
3:40
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 132 BPM
HEADS WILL ROLL · BAR 17

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 48 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 99 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 99, 116 and 132 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 Heads Will Roll use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 132 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-32, 73-75, 77 and 86-89, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Heads Will Roll hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 121 BARS ANALYSED