PARAMORE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Only Exception

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 30, 32 and 34, and 5 more places -- 30.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
6/4
BARS
68
LENGTH
2:57
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
THE ONLY EXCEPTION · BAR 30

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 37 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 104 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, 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 104, 121 and 138 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 Only Exception use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 6/4 at 138 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 30, 32, 34 and 36, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Only Exception hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 68 BARS ANALYSED