PIERCE THE VEIL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in One Hundred Sleepless Nights

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 28, 30 and 32, and 6 more places -- 18.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
123 BPM
TIME
6/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
5:23
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 123 BPM
ONE HUNDRED SLEEPLESS NIGHTS · BAR 28

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 29 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 48 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 92 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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 92, 108 and 123 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 One Hundred Sleepless Nights use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 6/4 at 123 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 28, 30, 32 and 34, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in One Hundred Sleepless Nights hard?

29 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 112 BARS ANALYSED