DAGAMES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Black SSD

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 47-52, 55-60 and 87-92, and 6 more places -- 20.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
170 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
190
LENGTH
4:28
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 170 BPM
BLACK SSD · BAR 47

It is played on crash, snare 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 54 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 128 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 128, 149 and 170 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 SSD use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 170 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 47-52, 55-60, 87-92 and 95-100, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Black SSD hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 190 BARS ANALYSED