PARAMORE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Last Hope

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 7-21 -- 17.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
102 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
97
LENGTH
3:48
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 102 BPM
LAST HOPE · BARS 7-8

It is played on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 53 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 66 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 66, 78, 90 and 102 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 Last Hope use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 102 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7-21. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Last Hope hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 97 BARS ANALYSED