JIMI HENDRIX · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Straight Ahead

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-30, 32 and 42-45, and 3 more places -- 16.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
108 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
125
LENGTH
4:37
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 108 BPM
STRAIGHT AHEAD · BAR 26

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 32 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 63 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 81 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 81, 95 and 108 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 Straight Ahead use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 108 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-30, 32, 42-45 and 54, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Straight Ahead hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 63 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 · 125 BARS ANALYSED