RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Can't Stop

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-20, 22-27 and 37-40, and 7 more places -- 38.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
92 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
97
LENGTH
4:13
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 92 BPM
CAN'T STOP · BAR 13

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 43 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 59 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 69 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, hi-hat 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 69, 81 and 92 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 Can't Stop use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 92 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-20, 22-27, 37-40 and 42-44, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Can't Stop hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 97 BARS ANALYSED