X-JAPAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Standing Sex

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 37-43, 53-58 and 61-67, and 8 more places -- 39.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
186
LENGTH
4:15
DIFFICULTY
84/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
STANDING SEX · BAR 38

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 70 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 84 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 114 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 114, 134, 155 and 175 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 Standing Sex use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 37-43, 53-58, 61-67 and 69-74, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Standing Sex hard?

70 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 84 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 186 BARS ANALYSED