SPIDERBAIT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Black Betty

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-6, 41-42 and 72-83 -- 17.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:21
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
BLACK BETTY · BAR 3

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 55 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 94 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. 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 Black Betty use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-6, 41-42 and 72-83. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Black Betty hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 104 BARS ANALYSED