LAZYTOWN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in We Are Number One

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-6, 9-10 and 15-19, and 13 more places -- 39.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
162 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
94
LENGTH
2:19
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 162 BPM
WE ARE NUMBER ONE · BARS 5-6

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 33 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 52 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 122 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. 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 122, 142 and 162 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 We Are Number One use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 162 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-6, 9-10, 15-19 and 21-22, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in We Are Number One hard?

33 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 52 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 · 94 BARS ANALYSED