LED ZEPPELIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Out On The Tiles

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 63, 65 and 67, and 14 more places -- 17.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
97 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
96
LENGTH
3:52
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 97 BPM
OUT ON THE TILES · BAR 65

It is played on crash, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 28 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 67 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 73 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, and nothing else. 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 73, 85 and 97 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 Out On The Tiles use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 97 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 63, 65, 67 and 69, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Out On The Tiles hard?

28 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 96 BARS ANALYSED