BREAKING BENJAMIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dark

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 44, 46-52 and 54, and 2 more places -- 33.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
115 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
61
LENGTH
2:07
DIFFICULTY
18/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 115 BPM
DARK · BAR 44

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 18 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 86 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 86, 101 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 Dark use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 115 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 44, 46-52, 54 and 56, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dark hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 18 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 61 BARS ANALYSED