QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in God Is In The Radio

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 9 and 11, and 12 more places -- 50% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
117 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
173
LENGTH
5:50
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 117 BPM
GOD IS IN THE RADIO · BAR 11

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 42 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 61 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 88 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 88, 102 and 117 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 God Is In The Radio use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 117 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 50% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9, 11 and 13, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in God Is In The Radio hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 173 BARS ANALYSED