QUEEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sweet Lady V2

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 76-103 -- 27.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
118 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
116
LENGTH
4:10
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 118 BPM
SWEET LADY V2 · BAR 76

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 32 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 55 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 89 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 89, 103 and 118 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 Sweet Lady V2 use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 3/4 at 118 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 76-103. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sweet Lady V2 hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 116 BARS ANALYSED