MANOWAR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Call To Arms

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 12-22, 24-30 and 32-40, and 5 more places -- 48.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
5:01
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
CALL TO ARMS · BAR 13

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 much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 67 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 75 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 75, 88, 102 and 115 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 Call To Arms use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 48.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12-22, 24-30, 32-40 and 42-48, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Call To Arms hard?

58 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 144 BARS ANALYSED