GREEN DAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lazy Bones

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-27, 97-111 and 141-148 -- 33.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
166 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
149
LENGTH
3:35
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 166 BPM
LAZY BONES · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 54 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 125 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 125, 145 and 166 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 Lazy Bones use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 166 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-27, 97-111 and 141-148. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lazy Bones hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 149 BARS ANALYSED