NIRVANA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Heart-Shaped Box

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-19, 37-51 and 73-91 -- 45.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
95 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
4:43
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 95 BPM
HEART-SHAPED BOX · BARS 5-6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 27 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 54 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 71 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 71, 83 and 95 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 Heart-Shaped Box use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 95 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 45.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-19, 37-51 and 73-91. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Heart-Shaped Box hard?

27 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 112 BARS ANALYSED