THE BLACK KEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lonely Boy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 20-43 and 60-83 -- 39% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
166 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
3:11
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 166 BPM
LONELY BOY · BAR 21

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 48 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 Lonely Boy 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 39% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 20-43 and 60-83. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lonely Boy hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 132 BARS ANALYSED