QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in No One Knows

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5, 7 and 9, and 33 more places -- 33.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
169 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
180
LENGTH
4:16
DIFFICULTY
74/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 169 BPM
NO ONE KNOWS · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 29 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 74 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 127 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 127, 148 and 169 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 No One Knows use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 169 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5, 7, 9 and 12-13, and 32 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in No One Knows hard?

29 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 74 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 180 BARS ANALYSED