ARCTIC MONKEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Stop The World I Want To Get Off With You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11, 13 and 15, and 15 more places -- 27.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
95 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
73
LENGTH
3:04
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 95 BPM
STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF WITH YOU · BAR 19

It is played on snare, mid tom 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 42 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 71 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 71, 83 and 95 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 Stop The World I Want To Get Off With You use?

A one-bar groove on snare, mid tom and kick, in 4/4 at 95 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11, 13, 15 and 19, and 14 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Stop The World I Want To Get Off With You hard?

29 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 73 BARS ANALYSED