SMASHING PUMPKINS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Siva

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 78-80 and 82-97 -- 17.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
109 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
116
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
82/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 109 BPM
SIVA · BAR 82

It is played on mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 43 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 82 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 82 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 82, 95 and 109 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 Siva use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 109 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 78-80 and 82-97. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Siva hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 82 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 116 BARS ANALYSED