DEFTONES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in departing the body

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5, 7 and 9, and 39 more places -- 37% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
158 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
137
LENGTH
3:28
DIFFICULTY
47/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 158 BPM
DEPARTING THE BODY · BAR 5

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 47 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 119 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. 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 119, 138 and 158 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 departing the body use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 158 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5, 7, 9 and 11, and 38 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in departing the body hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 47 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 137 BARS ANALYSED