DREAM THEATER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in A Fortune In Lies

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 120-151 -- 16.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
195
LENGTH
5:35
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
A FORTUNE IN LIES · BARS 120-121

It is played on the snare, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 4 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 56 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 105 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 105, 123 and 140 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 A Fortune In Lies use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 120-151. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in A Fortune In Lies hard?

4 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 56 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 195 BARS ANALYSED