ANGELMAKER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in bloodthirster (fixed)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 26-41, 50 and 52-54, and 6 more places -- 22% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
164
LENGTH
3:59
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
BLOODTHIRSTER (FIXED) · BAR 26

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 47 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 66 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

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 124 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, and nothing else. 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 124, 144 and 165 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 bloodthirster (fixed) use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 26-41, 50, 52-54 and 56, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in bloodthirster (fixed) hard?

47 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 164 BARS ANALYSED