IMAGINE DRAGONS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Radioactive

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-18, 20-22 and 25-26, and 17 more places -- 59.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
136 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:04
DIFFICULTY
23/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 136 BPM
RADIOACTIVE · BAR 17

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 11 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 23 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 102 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 102, 119 and 136 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 Radioactive use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 136 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-18, 20-22, 25-26 and 28-30, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Radioactive hard?

11 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 23 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 104 BARS ANALYSED