MACHINE HEAD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Davidian

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 144-148, 150 and 152-156, and 7 more places -- 15.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
184
LENGTH
5:28
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
DAVIDIAN · BAR 144

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 54 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 83 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 88 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 88, 104, 119 and 135 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 Davidian use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 144-148, 150, 152-156 and 158, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Davidian hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 83 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 184 BARS ANALYSED