TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in What You Know

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-15, 33-39 and 41-47, and 4 more places -- 53.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
139 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
3:03
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 139 BPM
WHAT YOU KNOW · BAR 10

It is played on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 43 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 51 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 104 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 104, 122 and 139 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 What You Know use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 139 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 53.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-15, 33-39, 41-47 and 65-71, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in What You Know hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 51 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