DESCENDENTS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Thank You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 114-115, 118-119 and 123-124, and 18 more places -- 19.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
173 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
209
LENGTH
4:50
DIFFICULTY
88/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 173 BPM
THANK YOU · BAR 114

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 75 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 88 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 95 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 95, 115, 134, 154 and 173 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 Thank You use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 173 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 114-115, 118-119, 123-124 and 127, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 59 times over the song.

Is the beat in Thank You hard?

75 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 88 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 209 BARS ANALYSED