DEFTONES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) Remaster

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-12, 14-16 and 18, and 18 more places -- 25.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
80 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
122
LENGTH
6:06
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 80 BPM
BE QUIET AND DRIVE (FAR AWAY) REMASTER · BAR 10

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 51 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 61 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 52 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 52, 61, 71 and 80 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 Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) Remaster use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 80 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-12, 14-16, 18 and 20, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) Remaster hard?

51 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 122 BARS ANALYSED