KASABIAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Underdog

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-13, 15-17 and 19-21, and 10 more places -- 37.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
102 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
4:09
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 102 BPM
UNDERDOG · BAR 11

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 59 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 77 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 77, 89 and 102 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 Underdog use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 102 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-13, 15-17, 19-21 and 23, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Underdog hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 106 BARS ANALYSED