LED ZEPPELIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in No Quarter (TSRTS)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 66-80, 120-124 and 126, and 7 more places -- 26.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
274
LENGTH
9:58
DIFFICULTY
36/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
NO QUARTER (TSRTS) · BAR 120

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 36 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 83 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 83, 96 and 110 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 Quarter (TSRTS) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 66-80, 120-124, 126 and 128-135, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in No Quarter (TSRTS) hard?

12 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 274 BARS ANALYSED