THIS WILL DESTROY YOU · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Quiet

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-35 -- 32% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
101
LENGTH
3:31
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
QUIET · BARS 5-6

It is played on hi-hat, snare 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 37 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 86 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 86, 101 and 115 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 use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-35. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Quiet hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 101 BARS ANALYSED