WEEZER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Only In Dreams

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-32, 43-60 and 71-76, and 1 more place -- 34.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
78 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
148
LENGTH
7:35
DIFFICULTY
42/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 78 BPM
ONLY IN DREAMS · BAR 9

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 42 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 59 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, ride 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 59, 68 and 78 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 In Dreams use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 78 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-32, 43-60, 71-76 and 93-94. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Only In Dreams hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 42 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 · 148 BARS ANALYSED