TOBY FOX · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in DELTARUNE-Black Knife

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-48, 57-72 and 89-120, and 1 more place -- 66.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
147 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
144
LENGTH
3:55
DIFFICULTY
83/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 147 BPM
DELTARUNE-BLACK KNIFE · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 71 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

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 81 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, hi-hat 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 81, 97, 114, 130 and 147 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 DELTARUNE-Black Knife use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 147 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 66.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-48, 57-72, 89-120 and 129-144. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in DELTARUNE-Black Knife hard?

71 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. 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 · 144 BARS ANALYSED