RADIOHEAD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in There, There

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-59, 61-124 and 159-165 -- 78.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
126 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
166
LENGTH
5:16
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 126 BPM
THERE, THERE · BAR 1

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 52 out of 100 -- a step up -- 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 82 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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, 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 82, 97, 111 and 126 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 There, There use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 126 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 78.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-59, 61-124 and 159-165. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in There, There hard?

52 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. 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 · 166 BARS ANALYSED