BRAND OF SACRIFICE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Eclipse 2

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-18 -- 26.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
112 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
71
LENGTH
2:31
DIFFICULTY
74/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
ECLIPSE 2 · BAR 1

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 74 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 84 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 84, 98 and 112 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 Eclipse 2 use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-18. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Eclipse 2 hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 74 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 71 BARS ANALYSED