TEMPLE OF THE DOG · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hunger Strike

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-39 -- 28.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
139 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
137
LENGTH
3:57
DIFFICULTY
48/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 139 BPM
HUNGER STRIKE · BARS 1-2

It is played on the hi-hat, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 7 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 48 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 104 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. 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.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 104, 122 and 139 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 Hunger Strike use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, in 4/4 at 139 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-39. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Hunger Strike hard?

7 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 48 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 · 137 BARS ANALYSED