ALICE IN CHAINS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Check My Brain

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9, 11 and 13, and 20 more places -- 45% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
113 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:41
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 113 BPM
CHECK MY BRAIN · BAR 11

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 25 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 85 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, and nothing else. 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 85, 99 and 113 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 Check My Brain use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 113 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 45% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9, 11, 13 and 15, and 19 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Check My Brain hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 104 BARS ANALYSED