TYLER, THE CREATOR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25, 27 and 29, and 42 more places -- 18.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
343
LENGTH
10:08
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE · BAR 25

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 32 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 101 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. 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 101, 118 and 135 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 SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25, 27, 29 and 31, and 41 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 24 times over the song.

Is the beat in SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 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 · 343 BARS ANALYSED