AT THE GATES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in World Of Lies

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-16, 50-51 and 53-59, and 3 more places -- 31.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
115
LENGTH
3:27
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
WORLD OF LIES · BAR 10

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 45 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 71 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 94 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 94, 109 and 125 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 World Of Lies use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-16, 50-51, 53-59 and 85-90, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in World Of Lies hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 115 BARS ANALYSED