IRON MAIDEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Can I Play With Madness (LIVE!)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4-5, 8-9 and 12-13, and 9 more places -- 18.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
145 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
131
LENGTH
3:38
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 145 BPM
CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS (LIVE!) · BAR 4

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 45 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 109 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. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 109, 127 and 145 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 Can I Play With Madness (LIVE!) use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 145 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 4-5, 8-9, 12-13 and 16-17, and 8 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Can I Play With Madness (LIVE!) hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 131 BARS ANALYSED