Catching Smoke Drum/Polyrhythm Breakdown
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
King Gizzard excel at creating absolutely bizarre music that manages to sound completely cohesive.
Sure, anybody can make a song with three different polymeters interacting by copy/pasting in a DAW, but making one that sounds catchy and not just like throwing a calculator at a guitar? That’s a rare skill.
In this breakdown we will be looking at the drum patterns in Catching Smoke, but also at how the rhythms of the other instruments and the lyrics interact, because good god does it get complex (like four polymeters at once complex).
Here’s where you can download the full drum sheet music:
Catching Smoke starts with this long riff on the keyboard, which repeats six times:
This is seriously in need of some barlines. But where do we put them? What time signature/s?
This riff is split into two sections, which are almost identical except for the last six notes, and are 33 eighth notes each.
If we approach this mathematically, we can only divide 33 by eleven and three, so we end up with three bars of 11/8:
Well that looks awful, and when you try and follow this sheet music with the song, it feels like the phrases get cut in half by the bars. We can do better.
My personal philosophy about time signatures and barlines is that you should group bars by how they feel and how we think about them, rather than consistent math.
When I listen to this riff, it feels like 4/4, with something weird happening at the end of the fourth bar. Here’s what we end up with:
While this might look more complicated initially, it is a much more intuitive way of grouping the music by how it sounds, and will make a lot more sense later on.
Next, the drums kick in unison with the bass:
And this is where our polyrhythms start, because the keyboard just keeps on going with its initial riff. So while our brains might be grouping the keys riff into bars of 4/4 with a remainder, the true time signature is 11/8.
The best way to play this is to focus on counting your own rhythm, and don’t get distracted by the keyboard.
Here is the best way I have found to count this riff, and is the reason I have grouped the notes into dotted quarter notes wherever possible:
Counting out everything in threes works effectively here, and makes sense in context with what we do in the next section’s polyrhythms:
So, here’s what is happening in this section:
The lyrics come in, and roughly follow the drums in a 3/8 pattern.
The keys keep on playing their 4/4ish pattern from earlier.
The bass keeps playing the 11/8 rhythm we just established.
All of this at the same time, and somehow it just makes sense when you listen to it.
How?
I think there are two main ways King Gizz make this work:
The lyrics, which people mainly gravitate towards when listening to music, are following the very simple rhythm of the drums which gives us a steady pulse to sway to.
The keys which start the song use 4/4 phrasing with a small change every four bars, which gives your ear something clear and familiar to hang on to at least initially.
A further element which helps is that the 11/8 riff contains several 3/8 elements (the dotted quarter notes), which is good to bear in mind for later (I know, more foreshadowing but trust me it all comes together).
At the end of this triple-polymeter section we get to a prechorus which takes us back to the phrasing from the beginning of the song:
See, I said it would make sense later on.
The 4/4-with-a-bit-extra phrasing continues through the chorus without any polymeters, and then we get this:
Alright lets break it down:
Bass is playing a simple 3/16 loop.
Drums are playing the same beat from the chorus, but also adding kick drums to play in unison with the notes accented by the bass (except when they fall on the same beat as a snare).
The keys are playing the same 4/4ish riff from the intro.
The vocals are singing in a 5/8 pattern.
That’s right, King Gizz decided there wasn’t enough going on so why not have the vocals sing in a different time signature on top of everything?
Good grief.
Again, this section doesn’t sound chaotic, I think in most part thanks to the drums and keys keeping their 4/4ish pattern going.
Plus, the 3/2 polymeter created by the bass and the kick drum is a remarkably common polyrhythm in songs, so even if you don’t usually listen to complex music, it will sound at least somewhat familiar.
And after that, we get the most complex section of the song for drummers to master:
Rember the part from earlier where the drums were play a 3/8 pulse with the vocals while the bass kept the 11/8 riff going?
Well now you have to do both of those with each half of your body.
A good strategy I use for learning/teaching polyrhythms like this is to try and get a feel for how the shorter polymeter gets displaced each bar, in this case the 3/8 pattern on the high tom.
In the sheet music below, I have written out the counting we used before for the 11/8 groove and highlighted which counts the high toms fall on:
You can see that the high tom moves a count later each bar, and the pattern repeats after the third bar where the polymeters line up.
If you are having trouble with this pattern, start by getting each bar seperately, and counting out loud can be a massive help.
The 11s over 3s pattern is by far the most challenging part of the song, so lets cover the last couple of variations in the home stretch!
After the keyboard solo we have a return to the 11/8 pattern on the bass, with very simplified drums:
Easy.
In the next section, we technically don’t change time signature, but I have written out the drums in 6/8 as it makes the repeating patterns much easier to see:
For the bass part, I have removed the 6/8 barlines and placed dotted barlines so you can see where the 11/8 bars would line up.
Again, the time signature doesn’t change here from the perspective of the bass part, but since this is a drum newletter, I’ve written it out how it feels to play as a durmmer, making it much easier to understand and memorise.
Aside from that, the only part we haven’t covered is this nice easy beat where everyone plays in 4/4:
Some slightly offbeat or quick fills, but nothing we have to break down with maths.
Once we’re through the 4/4 section, we return to this beat from earlier where the kick drum follws the 3/16 bass pattern:
And you’re done!
Well, if you want to be extra pedantic (like me) there are also these 5/4 hihats which tease the next track on the album, 2.02 Killer Year:
What a monster of a song.
Congrats on making it all the way through this breakdown!
I hope it gave you a new appreciation for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and helps you get a handle on not just Catching Smoke, but their style in general.
Please consider sharing this newsletter with someone who might enjoy it and leave a comment of any other songs/bands you’d like to see broken down!
- AJ