SAMURAI (CYBERPUNK 2077) · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Never Fade Away

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23, 33-39 and 59-66 -- 20.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
144 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
111
LENGTH
3:05
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 144 BPM
NEVER FADE AWAY · BAR 18

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 14 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 57 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 108 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 108, 126 and 144 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 Never Fade Away use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 144 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 33-39 and 59-66. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Never Fade Away hard?

14 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 111 BARS ANALYSED