JOY AGAIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Looking Out for You

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 51-66 and 115-130 -- 23.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
202 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
147
LENGTH
2:55
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 202 BPM
LOOKING OUT FOR YOU · BARS 51-52

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 60 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 152 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 152, 177 and 202 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 Looking Out for You use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 202 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 51-66 and 115-130. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Looking Out for You hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 60 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 · 147 BARS ANALYSED