ONE DIRECTION · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Midnight Memories

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-27, 29-31 and 33-35, and 9 more places -- 29.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
157 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
113
LENGTH
2:53
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 157 BPM
MIDNIGHT MEMORIES · BAR 26

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 46 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 118 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 118, 137 and 157 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 Midnight Memories use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 157 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-27, 29-31, 33-35 and 37-38, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Midnight Memories hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 46 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 · 113 BARS ANALYSED