PJ HARVEY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dress

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 10-11, 13-14 and 16-17, and 20 more places -- 36.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
157 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
3:05
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 157 BPM
DRESS · BARS 10-11

It is played on snare, mid tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 30 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 38 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 118 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 118, 137 and 157 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 Dress use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, mid tom and kick, in 4/4 at 157 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 36.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-11, 13-14, 16-17 and 19-20, and 19 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dress hard?

30 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 38 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 · 121 BARS ANALYSED