LAMB OF GOD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Anthropoid

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-38, 41-46 and 81-86, and 8 more places -- 27% 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
171
LENGTH
3:34
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 200 BPM
ANTHROPOID · BAR 33

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 50 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 Anthropoid 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 27% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 33-38, 41-46, 81-86 and 89-94, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Anthropoid hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 171 BARS ANALYSED