JEFFERSON AIRPLANE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in White Rabbit

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-20, 25-32 and 36, and 1 more place -- 60.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
66
LENGTH
2:38
DIFFICULTY
22/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
WHITE RABBIT · BAR 3

It is played on the snare, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 10 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 22 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 75 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 75, 88 and 100 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 White Rabbit use?

A one-bar groove on snare, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 60.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-20, 25-32, 36 and 45-56. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in White Rabbit hard?

10 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 22 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how fine the subdivision is.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 66 BARS ANALYSED