SKILLET · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Back From The Dead

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 21-23 and 29-35, and 13 more places -- 59% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
3:25
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
BACK FROM THE DEAD · BAR 30

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 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 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 124 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 124, 144 and 165 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 Back From The Dead use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 59% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 21-23, 29-35 and 37-43, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Back From The Dead hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. 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 · 141 BARS ANALYSED