U2 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Where The Streets Have No Name

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-28, 30 and 34-38, and 13 more places -- 59% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
30 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
16:02
DIFFICULTY
36/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 30 BPM
WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME · BAR 26

It is played on mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 36 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

There is not much to reduce here -- the room opens it near enough as written, at 40 BPM, and asks for it clean before it moves.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Two tempos only, 40 and 30 BPM, and the gate at each is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Where The Streets Have No Name use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 30 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-28, 30, 34-38 and 42-44, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Where The Streets Have No Name hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 121 BARS ANALYSED