KELLY CLARKSON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Behind These Hazel Eyes (Drums)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-15, 23-36 and 50-56, and 2 more places -- 28.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
180 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
147
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 180 BPM
BEHIND THESE HAZEL EYES (DRUMS) · BAR 11

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 42 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 135 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 135, 158 and 180 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 Behind These Hazel Eyes (Drums) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 180 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-15, 23-36, 50-56 and 58-64, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Behind These Hazel Eyes (Drums) hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 147 BARS ANALYSED