HARLOTT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ballistic

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 14-17, 30-33 and 55-58 -- 16.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
250 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
73
LENGTH
1:11
DIFFICULTY
82/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 250 BPM
BALLISTIC · BAR 14

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 63 out of 100 -- a step up -- 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 163 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 163, 192, 221 and 250 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 Ballistic use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 250 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 14-17, 30-33 and 55-58. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 14 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ballistic hard?

63 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 82 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 73 BARS ANALYSED