SIX FEET UNDER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Feasting On The Blood Of The Insane

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 38-56 and 83-101 -- 34.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
72 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
111
LENGTH
6:12
DIFFICULTY
85/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 72 BPM
FEASTING ON THE BLOOD OF THE INSANE · BAR 38

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 72 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 85 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 40 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 40, 48, 56, 64 and 72 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 Feasting On The Blood Of The Insane use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 72 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 38-56 and 83-101. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Feasting On The Blood Of The Insane hard?

72 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 85 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 111 BARS ANALYSED