BATHORY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Flash Of The Silverhammer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3, 5-7 and 17-19, and 8 more places -- 32.7% 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
101
LENGTH
3:35
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 112 BPM
FLASH OF THE SILVERHAMMER · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 65 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. 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 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 Flash Of The Silverhammer use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 112 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3, 5-7, 17-19 and 21-23, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Flash Of The Silverhammer hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 101 BARS ANALYSED