DMITRIY BEZNOSOW · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Dragon's Flight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 73-88 -- 21.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
101 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
97
LENGTH
3:49
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 101 BPM
DRAGON'S FLIGHT · BAR 73

It is played on crash, ride, snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 58 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 53 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 66 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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. 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, ride 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 66, 77, 89 and 101 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 Dragon's Flight use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 101 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 73-88. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Dragon's Flight hard?

58 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 114 BARS ANALYSED