WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Quiet Little Voices

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-23, 25-31 and 33-39, and 5 more places -- 31.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
174 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
177
LENGTH
3:55
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
QUIET LITTLE VOICES · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 78 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 83 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 96 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 96, 115, 135, 154 and 174 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 Quiet Little Voices use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-23, 25-31, 33-39 and 41-47, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Quiet Little Voices hard?

78 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 177 BARS ANALYSED