LOUDNESS OF SOUND · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Beelzebub

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 2-8, 10-16 and 18-24, and 1 more place -- 33.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
151 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
84
LENGTH
2:14
DIFFICULTY
82/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 151 BPM
BEELZEBUB · BARS 2-3

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 46 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

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 113 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 113, 132 and 151 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 Beelzebub use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 151 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-8, 10-16, 18-24 and 26-32. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Beelzebub hard?

46 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 the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 84 BARS ANALYSED