SATYRICON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dark Medieval Times

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 54-67 -- 23% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
165 BPM
TIME
6/4
BARS
122
LENGTH
4:47
DIFFICULTY
76/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 165 BPM
DARK MEDIEVAL TIMES · BAR 54

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 76 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 124 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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, ride 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 124, 144 and 165 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 Medieval Times use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 6/4 at 165 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 54-67. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dark Medieval Times hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 76 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 122 BARS ANALYSED