KALEO · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in No Good

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 16-17, 20-26 and 28-29, and 9 more places -- 37.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
72 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
97
LENGTH
5:20
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 72 BPM
NO GOOD · BAR 28

It is played on mid tom 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 32 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 54 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 54, 63 and 72 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 No Good use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom and kick, in 4/4 at 72 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 16-17, 20-26, 28-29 and 32-33, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in No Good hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 97 BARS ANALYSED