MARILYN MANSON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Beautiful People

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-40 and 57-71 -- 43% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
141 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
128
LENGTH
3:38
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 141 BPM
THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE · BAR 1

It is played on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 56 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 65 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 92 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 92, 108, 125 and 141 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 The Beautiful People use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 141 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 43% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-40 and 57-71. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Beautiful People hard?

56 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 128 BARS ANALYSED