GOJIRA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Born In Winter

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5, 7 and 9-10, and 22 more places -- 30.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
121
LENGTH
3:45
DIFFICULTY
80/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
BORN IN WINTER · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 58 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 80 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 83 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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, 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 83, 98, 113 and 128 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 Born In Winter use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5, 7, 9-10 and 12, and 21 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Born In Winter hard?

58 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 80 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 121 BARS ANALYSED