NIRVANA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Lithium E standard

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-19, 33-47 and 79-97 -- 39.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
123 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
129
LENGTH
4:12
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 123 BPM
LITHIUM E STANDARD · BAR 5

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 56 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 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, ride 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, 108 and 123 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 Lithium E standard use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 123 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-19, 33-47 and 79-97. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Lithium E standard hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 56 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 · 129 BARS ANALYSED