NIRVANA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in About A Girl (MTV Unplugged)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-7, 10 and 12, and 14 more places -- 30.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
119 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
89
LENGTH
2:58
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 119 BPM
ABOUT A GIRL (MTV UNPLUGGED) · BAR 6

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 63 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 89 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 89, 104 and 119 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 About A Girl (MTV Unplugged) use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 119 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-7, 10, 12 and 14, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in About A Girl (MTV Unplugged) hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 63 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 89 BARS ANALYSED