SABATON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Defence of Moscow

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15, 17 and 19, and 14 more places -- 16.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
112
LENGTH
4:04
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
DEFENCE OF MOSCOW · BAR 17

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 47 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 67 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 83 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 83, 96 and 110 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 Defence of Moscow use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15, 17, 19 and 21-22, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Defence of Moscow hard?

47 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 112 BARS ANALYSED