THE WHITE STRIPES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Hardest Button To Button

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-36, 65-72 and 98, and 3 more places -- 31.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
113
LENGTH
3:32
DIFFICULTY
27/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
THE HARDEST BUTTON TO BUTTON · BAR 13

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 27 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 96 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 96, 112 and 128 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 The Hardest Button To Button use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-36, 65-72, 98 and 100, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Hardest Button To Button hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 113 BARS ANALYSED