NINE INCH NAILS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Last

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-12, 17-32 and 83-106 -- 49.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
90 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
4:43
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 90 BPM
LAST · BAR 1

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth 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 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 68 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 68, 79 and 90 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 use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 90 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 49.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-12, 17-32 and 83-106.

Is the beat in Last hard?

39 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 · 106 BARS ANALYSED