JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Mirrors

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 41-86, 88 and 97-129, and 15 more places -- 41.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
155 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
306
LENGTH
7:54
DIFFICULTY
8/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 155 BPM
MIRRORS · BAR 41

It is played on crash and snare, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 1 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 8 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 116 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 116, 136 and 155 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 Mirrors use?

A one-bar groove on crash and snare, in 4/4 at 155 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 41-86, 88, 97-129 and 131, and 14 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Mirrors hard?

1 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 8 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 306 BARS ANALYSED