AMERICAN FOOTBALL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Stay Home

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 37-50 -- 18.7% 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
7/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
8:11
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
STAY HOME · BAR 39

It is played on crash, ride, high tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 62 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 57 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 78 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, ride 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 78, 92, 106 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 Stay Home use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, high tom, kick and hi-hat foot, in 7/4 at 120 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 37-50. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Stay Home hard?

62 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 57 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how fine the subdivision is.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 141 BARS ANALYSED