1914 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in A7v Mephisto

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-8, 13-17 and 19, and 75 more places -- 30.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
200 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
344
LENGTH
6:53
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 200 BPM
A7V MEPHISTO · BAR 49

It is played on crash and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 73 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 150 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 150, 175 and 200 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 A7v Mephisto use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 4/4 at 200 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-8, 13-17, 19 and 21, and 74 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in A7v Mephisto hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 344 BARS ANALYSED