MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The World Is Ugly

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-35, 65-74 and 81, and 7 more places -- 63.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
190 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
223
LENGTH
4:42
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 190 BPM
THE WORLD IS UGLY · BAR 111

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 40 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 143 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 143, 166 and 190 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 World Is Ugly use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 190 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 63.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-35, 65-74, 81 and 109-135, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in The World Is Ugly hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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 · 223 BARS ANALYSED