COREY HART · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sunglasses At Night

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-38, 41-50 and 70-75, and 9 more places -- 57.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
169
LENGTH
5:17
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT · BAR 33

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 46 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 52 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 96 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, ride 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 96, 112 and 128 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 Sunglasses At Night use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 57.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 33-38, 41-50, 70-75 and 78-87, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sunglasses At Night hard?

46 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 52 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 · 169 BARS ANALYSED