SYSTEM OF A DOWN AND WU-TANG CLAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Shame On A Nigga

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 29-36, 45-51 and 69-76 -- 29.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
81
LENGTH
2:42
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
SHAME ON A NIGGA · BAR 29

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 60 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 90 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 90, 105 and 120 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 Shame On A Nigga use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 29-36, 45-51 and 69-76. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Shame On A Nigga hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 60 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 · 81 BARS ANALYSED