SYSTEM OF A DOWN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Boom!

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-23 and 33-47 -- 34.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
154 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
86
LENGTH
2:14
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 154 BPM
BOOM! · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 70 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 70 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 100 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 100, 118, 136 and 154 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 Boom! use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 154 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-23 and 33-47. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Boom! hard?

70 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 86 BARS ANALYSED