DREAM THEATER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Fall Into The Light

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 159-176 and 179-193 -- 15.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
172 BPM
TIME
5/4
BARS
256
LENGTH
6:35
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 172 BPM
FALL INTO THE LIGHT · BAR 160

It is played on 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 the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 51 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 129 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 129, 151 and 172 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 Fall Into The Light use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 5/4 at 172 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 159-176 and 179-193. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in Fall Into The Light hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 51 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 · 256 BARS ANALYSED