KILLSWITCH ENGAGE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Abandon Us

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 46-52, 54-56 and 58-60, and 19 more places -- 38.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
200 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
184
LENGTH
3:41
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 200 BPM
ABANDON US · BAR 86

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 46 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 150 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 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 Abandon Us use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 200 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 46-52, 54-56, 58-60 and 73, and 18 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Abandon Us hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 46 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 · 184 BARS ANALYSED