KINGS OF LEON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Waste A Moment

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-16, 18-24 and 26-31, and 8 more places -- 40.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
115
LENGTH
3:04
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
WASTE A MOMENT · BAR 10

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 55 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 67 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 98 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 98, 115, 133 and 150 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 Waste A Moment use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 40.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-16, 18-24, 26-31 and 42-44, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Waste A Moment hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 115 BARS ANALYSED