GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Frozen Twilight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-33 and 98-124 -- 53.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
102 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
125
LENGTH
4:53
DIFFICULTY
38/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 102 BPM
FROZEN TWILIGHT · BAR 5

It is played on kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 38 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 77 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 77, 89 and 102 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 Frozen Twilight use?

A one-bar groove on kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 102 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 53.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-33 and 98-124. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Frozen Twilight hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 38 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 125 BARS ANALYSED