STONE TEMPLE PILOTS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Only Dying - Demo

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 120-133 and 169-188 -- 20.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
116 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
188
LENGTH
6:26
DIFFICULTY
43/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 116 BPM
ONLY DYING - DEMO · BARS 120-121

It is played on hi-hat, 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 43 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 87 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 87, 102 and 116 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 Only Dying - Demo use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 116 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 120-133 and 169-188. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Only Dying - Demo hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 43 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 188 BARS ANALYSED