U2 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in With or Without You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-77, 79-81 and 83, and 16 more places -- 85.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
4:48
DIFFICULTY
40/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
WITH OR WITHOUT YOU · BAR 1

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 40 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 83 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. 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.

Tempo goes 83, 96 and 110 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 With or Without You use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 85.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-77, 79-81, 83 and 85-99, and 15 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in With or Without You hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 40 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 · 132 BARS ANALYSED