NIRVANA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Stay Away

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 11-17, 27-33 and 43-49, and 4 more places -- 42% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
131
LENGTH
3:11
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
STAY AWAY · BARS 11-12

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 38 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 70 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 124 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. 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 124, 144 and 165 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 Stay Away use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 42% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-17, 27-33, 43-49 and 59-66, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Stay Away hard?

38 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 131 BARS ANALYSED