BRING ME THE HORIZON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Traitors Never Play Hang-man

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11, 13 and 15, and 8 more places -- 19% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
124
LENGTH
3:49
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
TRAITORS NEVER PLAY HANG-MAN · BAR 11

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 56 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 98 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, and nothing else. 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 98, 114 and 130 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 Traitors Never Play Hang-man use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11, 13, 15 and 17, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Traitors Never Play Hang-man hard?

44 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 56 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 124 BARS ANALYSED