ED SHEERAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Thinking Out Loud

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 17-46, 49-64 and 69-114, and 3 more places -- 85.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
158 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
176
LENGTH
4:27
DIFFICULTY
30/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 158 BPM
THINKING OUT LOUD · BARS 17-18

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 30 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 119 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.

Tempo goes 119, 138 and 158 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 Thinking Out Loud use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 158 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 85.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-46, 49-64, 69-114 and 117-132, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Thinking Out Loud hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 30 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 · 176 BARS ANALYSED