KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Lord of Lightning

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 20-22, 24 and 39, and 13 more places -- 28.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
113 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
126
LENGTH
4:29
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 113 BPM
THE LORD OF LIGHTNING · BAR 24

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 43 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 60 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 85 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 85, 99 and 113 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 Lord of Lightning use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 113 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 20-22, 24, 39 and 41, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Lord of Lightning hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 60 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 126 BARS ANALYSED