PRINCE, TOM PETTY, STEVE WINWOOD, JEFF LYNNE, DHANI HARRISON AND OTHERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Live)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-30, 33-39 and 57-63, and 23 more places -- 53.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
119 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
188
LENGTH
6:19
DIFFICULTY
36/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 119 BPM
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS (LIVE) · BAR 25

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 25 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 36 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 89, 104 and 119 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 While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Live) use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 119 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 53.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-30, 33-39, 57-63 and 65-67, and 22 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Live) hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 36 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 · 188 BARS ANALYSED