BEASTIE BOYS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sabotage

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-6, 15-18 and 31-34, and 2 more places -- 30.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
84 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
60
LENGTH
2:51
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 84 BPM
SABOTAGE · BAR 3

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 71 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 63 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 63, 74 and 84 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 Sabotage use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 84 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-6, 15-18, 31-34 and 48-51, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sabotage hard?

27 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 60 BARS ANALYSED