SLEEP TOKEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dark Signs

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-48 -- 33.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
142 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
158
LENGTH
4:27
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 142 BPM
DARK SIGNS · BARS 1-2

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 63 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 107 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 107, 124 and 142 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 Signs use?

A 2-bar phrase on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 142 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-48. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dark Signs hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 63 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how fine the subdivision is.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED