ARCTIC MONKEYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Piledriver Waltz

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-27, 29-31 and 33, and 15 more places -- 49.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
97
LENGTH
3:14
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
PILEDRIVER WALTZ · BAR 21

It is played on crash, ride and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 13 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 55 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 83 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 83, 96 and 110 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 Piledriver Waltz use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride and kick, in 3/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 49.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-27, 29-31, 33 and 35, and 14 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Piledriver Waltz hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 97 BARS ANALYSED