UNDERTALE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Asgore

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 14-16, 22-24 and 34-49, and 1 more place -- 43.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
114 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
83
LENGTH
2:54
DIFFICULTY
74/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 114 BPM
ASGORE · BAR 14

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 74 out of 100 -- demanding -- 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 most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 63 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 63, 76, 88, 101 and 114 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 use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 114 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 43.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 14-16, 22-24, 34-49 and 54-60. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Asgore hard?

74 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. 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 · 83 BARS ANALYSED