BERLIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Metro

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15-22, 35-42 and 52-59, and 1 more place -- 37.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
87 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
87
LENGTH
4:00
DIFFICULTY
86/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 87 BPM
THE METRO · BAR 15

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 76 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 86 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 48 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 48, 58, 67, 77 and 87 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 Metro use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 87 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15-22, 35-42, 52-59 and 72-79. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Metro hard?

76 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 86 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 87 BARS ANALYSED