IRON MAIDEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blood Brothers

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17, 19 and 21, and 17 more places -- 16.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
168 BPM
TIME
6/4
BARS
216
LENGTH
7:39
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 168 BPM
BLOOD BROTHERS · BAR 26

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 50 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 126 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 126, 147 and 168 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 Blood Brothers use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 6/4 at 168 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17, 19, 21 and 23, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Blood Brothers hard?

36 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 50 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 · 216 BARS ANALYSED