WEEZER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in We Might as Well Be Strangers

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 23, 25-31 and 33-35, and 7 more places -- 31.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
111 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
97
LENGTH
3:30
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 111 BPM
WE MIGHT AS WELL BE STRANGERS · BARS 25-26

It is played on crash, ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 48 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 52 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 83 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, 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 83, 97 and 111 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 We Might as Well Be Strangers use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 111 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 23, 25-31, 33-35 and 51, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in We Might as Well Be Strangers hard?

48 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 52 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 97 BARS ANALYSED