MINDLESS SELF INDULGENCE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lights Out

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-38, 61-74 and 78, and 4 more places -- 32.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
242 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
160
LENGTH
2:39
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 242 BPM
LIGHTS OUT · BAR 26

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 9 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 37 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 182 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.

Tempo goes 182, 212 and 242 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 Lights Out use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 242 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-38, 61-74, 78 and 82, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lights Out hard?

9 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 160 BARS ANALYSED