TITLE FIGHT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in No One Stays At The Top Forever

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15-18, 20-23 and 25-28, and 5 more places -- 27.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
2:21
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
NO ONE STAYS AT THE TOP FOREVER · BAR 15

It is played on crash and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 53 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 105 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 105, 123 and 140 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 One Stays At The Top Forever use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 3/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15-18, 20-23, 25-28 and 32, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in No One Stays At The Top Forever hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 98 BARS ANALYSED