PRIMUS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lacquer Head

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-15, 17-22 and 35-47, and 1 more place -- 29.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
113 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:40
DIFFICULTY
69/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 113 BPM
LACQUER HEAD · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 38 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 69 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 85 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 85, 99 and 113 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 Lacquer Head use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 113 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-15, 17-22, 35-47 and 49. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lacquer Head hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 104 BARS ANALYSED