IRON MAIDEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in 2 Minutes To Midnight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 42-43, 45-46 and 48, and 11 more places -- 20.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
186 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
283
LENGTH
6:05
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 186 BPM
2 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT · BAR 45

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 40 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 66 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 140 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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, 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 140, 163 and 186 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 2 Minutes To Midnight use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 186 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 42-43, 45-46, 48 and 50-53, and 10 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 25 times over the song.

Is the beat in 2 Minutes To Midnight hard?

40 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 283 BARS ANALYSED