MUSE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Assassin

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-27, 29-32 and 34, and 6 more places -- 19.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
131 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
114
LENGTH
3:23
DIFFICULTY
82/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 131 BPM
ASSASSIN · BAR 26

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 65 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

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 85 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 85, 100, 116 and 131 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 Assassin use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 131 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-27, 29-32, 34 and 36-37, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Assassin hard?

65 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 · 114 BARS ANALYSED