DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Black History Month

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 65-95 -- 32.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
114 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
96
LENGTH
3:22
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 114 BPM
BLACK HISTORY MONTH · BAR 66

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 37 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 86 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. 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.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 86, 100 and 114 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 History Month use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 114 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 65-95. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Black History Month hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 96 BARS ANALYSED