THOUSAND FOOT KRUTCH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Take It Out On Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-31, 33-35 and 37-39, and 6 more places -- 33% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
148 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
117
LENGTH
3:10
DIFFICULTY
49/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 148 BPM
TAKE IT OUT ON ME · BAR 25

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 49 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 111 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, and nothing else. 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 111, 130 and 148 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 Take It Out On Me use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 148 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-31, 33-35, 37-39 and 61-67, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Take It Out On Me hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 49 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 · 117 BARS ANALYSED