HARRY STYLES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Kiwi

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18-20, 22-24 and 26-28, and 12 more places -- 40.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
147 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
109
LENGTH
2:55
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 147 BPM
KIWI · BAR 18

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 55 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 110 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 110, 129 and 147 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 Kiwi use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 147 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 40.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18-20, 22-24, 26-28 and 30-32, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Kiwi hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 109 BARS ANALYSED