QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Burn The Witch

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-20, 22-24 and 38-39, and 12 more places -- 34.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
122 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
113
LENGTH
3:42
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 122 BPM
BURN THE WITCH · BAR 22

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 47 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 92 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 92, 107 and 122 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 Burn The Witch use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 122 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-20, 22-24, 38-39 and 42-43, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Burn The Witch hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 47 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 113 BARS ANALYSED