AVANTASIA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in another angel down

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 9-12 and 29-35, and 12 more places -- 51.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
107 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
153
LENGTH
5:34
DIFFICULTY
82/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 107 BPM
ANOTHER ANGEL DOWN · BAR 29

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 72 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 82 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 59 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 59, 71, 83, 95 and 107 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 another angel down use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 107 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 51.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9-12, 29-35 and 38-44, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in another angel down hard?

72 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 82 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 153 BARS ANALYSED