TWENTY ONE PILOTS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Heavy Dirty Soul

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-36, 40-42 and 44-46, and 2 more places -- 41.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
131 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
102
LENGTH
3:10
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 131 BPM
HEAVY DIRTY SOUL · BAR 21

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 50 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 61 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 98 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, hi-hat 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 98, 115 and 131 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 Heavy Dirty Soul use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 131 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-36, 40-42, 44-46 and 59-65, 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 Heavy Dirty Soul hard?

50 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 102 BARS ANALYSED