MÖTLEY CRÜE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Wild Side

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 8-9, 11-12 and 16-18, and 16 more places -- 29.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
4:45
DIFFICULTY
90/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
WILD SIDE · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 62 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 90 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 75 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. 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 75, 88, 102 and 115 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 Wild Side use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 8-9, 11-12, 16-18 and 20-22, and 15 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Wild Side hard?

62 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 90 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 145 BARS ANALYSED