SPECTRAL WOUND · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-17, 20-21 and 24, and 6 more places -- 37.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
170 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
242
LENGTH
5:42
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 170 BPM
ARISTOCRATIC SUICIDAL BLACK METAL · BAR 3

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 62 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 128 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, 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 128, 149 and 170 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 Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 170 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-17, 20-21, 24 and 26-33, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 242 BARS ANALYSED