LYNYRD SKYNYRD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Saturday Night Special (Album)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5, and 3 more places -- 15.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
154
LENGTH
5:06
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL (ALBUM) · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 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 52 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 90 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 and 120 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 Saturday Night Special (Album) use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 5 and 78, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Saturday Night Special (Album) hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 52 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 · 154 BARS ANALYSED