NEIL YOUNG · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Out On The Weekend

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-26, 37-57 and 67-73, and 1 more place -- 71.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
68 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
78
LENGTH
4:35
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 68 BPM
OUT ON THE WEEKEND · BAR 1

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 independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 41 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 51 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 51, 60 and 68 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 Weekend use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 68 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 71.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-26, 37-57, 67-73 and 77-78. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Out On The Weekend hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 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 · 78 BARS ANALYSED