TOM PETTY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in You Wreck Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-28, 30-56 and 58-72, and 2 more places -- 93.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
163 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
135
LENGTH
3:19
DIFFICULTY
33/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 163 BPM
YOU WRECK ME · BAR 6

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 33 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 122 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, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 122, 143 and 163 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 You Wreck Me use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 163 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 93.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-28, 30-56, 58-72 and 74-108, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in You Wreck Me hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 33 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 · 135 BARS ANALYSED