PEARL JAM · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Once

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 29-31, 33-35 and 49-51, and 6 more places -- 23.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
81 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
99
LENGTH
4:47
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 81 BPM
ONCE · BAR 30

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 45 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 64 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 61 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 61, 71 and 81 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 Once use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 81 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 29-31, 33-35, 49-51 and 53-55, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Once hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 64 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 · 99 BARS ANALYSED