FEAR FACTORY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Body Hammer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 22-24, 26-28 and 30-32, and 15 more places -- 23.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
210
LENGTH
5:05
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
BODY HAMMER · BAR 22

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 10 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 63 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 124 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 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 Body Hammer use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 22-24, 26-28, 30-32 and 34-36, and 14 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Body Hammer hard?

10 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 63 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 · 210 BARS ANALYSED