KINGS OF LEON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Temple

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-36 and 57-80 -- 32.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
149 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
152
LENGTH
4:05
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 149 BPM
TEMPLE · BAR 13

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 30 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 50 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 112 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 112, 130 and 149 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 Temple use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 149 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-36 and 57-80. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Temple hard?

30 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 152 BARS ANALYSED