ARCTIC MONKEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Old Yellow Bricks

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-9, 26-31 and 50-54, and 1 more place -- 31.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:05
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
OLD YELLOW BRICKS · BAR 2

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 62 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 101 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 101, 118 and 135 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 Old Yellow Bricks use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-9, 26-31, 50-54 and 72-85. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Old Yellow Bricks hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 104 BARS ANALYSED