KINGS OF LEON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sex On Fire

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-32, 42-55 and 74-87 -- 43.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
153 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
130
LENGTH
3:24
DIFFICULTY
49/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 153 BPM
SEX ON FIRE · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 31 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 49 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 115 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 115, 134 and 153 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 Sex On Fire use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 153 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 43.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-32, 42-55 and 74-87. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sex On Fire hard?

31 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 49 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 · 130 BARS ANALYSED