TENACIOUS D · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Beelzeboss.

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 12-21, 38-43 and 82, and 2 more places -- 27.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
190
LENGTH
5:26
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
BEELZEBOSS. · BAR 12

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 68 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 61 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 77 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 5 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. 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, and nothing else. 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 77, 93, 109, 124 and 140 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 Beelzeboss. use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12-21, 38-43, 82 and 86, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Beelzeboss. hard?

68 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 61 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how fine the subdivision is.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 190 BARS ANALYSED