WOLF & BEAR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in BELLADONNA

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 52-65 -- 15.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
154 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
2:45
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 154 BPM
BELLADONNA · BAR 53

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 59 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 116 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. 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 116, 135 and 154 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 BELLADONNA use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 154 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 52-65. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in BELLADONNA hard?

44 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 59 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 · 98 BARS ANALYSED