TOBY FOX · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Asgore Guitar version

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 26, 28-30 and 32-34, and 4 more places -- 21.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
121 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
75
LENGTH
2:28
DIFFICULTY
74/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 121 BPM
ASGORE GUITAR VERSION · BARS 28-29

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 74 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 79 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 79, 93, 107 and 121 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 Asgore Guitar version use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 121 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26, 28-30, 32-34 and 36-38, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Asgore Guitar version hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 74 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 75 BARS ANALYSED