NINE INCH NAILS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Eraser

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-100 -- 75.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
132
LENGTH
3:18
DIFFICULTY
45/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
ERASER · BARS 1-2

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 26 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 45 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 98 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. 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 98, 114 and 130 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 Eraser use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 3/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 75.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-100. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Eraser hard?

26 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 45 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 · 132 BARS ANALYSED