MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Vampire Money

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-42, 45-46 and 51-53, and 5 more places -- 35.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
183 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
156
LENGTH
3:25
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 183 BPM
VAMPIRE MONEY · BAR 46

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 34 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 61 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 137 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 137, 160 and 183 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 Vampire Money use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 183 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 33-42, 45-46, 51-53 and 55-64, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Vampire Money hard?

34 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 156 BARS ANALYSED