KISS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Black Diamond

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 12, 16 and 54, and 1 more place -- 26.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
104 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
150
LENGTH
5:30
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 104 BPM
BLACK DIAMOND · BAR 117

It is played on crash, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 8 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 53 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 78 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 78, 91 and 104 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 Black Diamond use?

A one-bar groove on crash, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 104 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12, 16, 54 and 117-150. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Black Diamond hard?

8 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 150 BARS ANALYSED