THE BEATLES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Drive My Car

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4-9, 12-25 and 28-34, and 5 more places -- 83.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
122 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
75
LENGTH
2:26
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 122 BPM
DRIVE MY CAR · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 38 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 45 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 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. 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 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 Drive My Car use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 122 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 83.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 4-9, 12-25, 28-34 and 36-41, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Drive My Car hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 75 BARS ANALYSED