VK · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Foidbrutal2

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2, 10-11 and 14, and 4 more places -- 16.9% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
90
LENGTH
2:45
DIFFICULTY
92/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
FOIDBRUTAL2 · BAR 11

It is played on crash, 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 how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 92 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 72 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 72, 86, 101, 115 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 Foidbrutal2 use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2, 10-11, 14 and 23, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Foidbrutal2 hard?

72 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 92 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 90 BARS ANALYSED