TESTAMENT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Disciples Of The Watch

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 22, 25 and 29, and 29 more places -- 25.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
216
LENGTH
6:48
DIFFICULTY
90/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
DISCIPLES OF THE WATCH · BAR 50

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 68 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 90 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 78 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 78, 92, 106 and 120 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 Disciples Of The Watch use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 22, 25, 29 and 50, and 28 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Disciples Of The Watch hard?

68 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 90 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 216 BARS ANALYSED