SONATA ARTICA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Full moon

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-37, 59-65 and 67-73, and 6 more places -- 39.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
181
LENGTH
4:50
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
FULL MOON · BAR 28

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 49 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 61 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 113 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, ride 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 113, 131 and 150 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 Full moon use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 27-37, 59-65, 67-73 and 75-85, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Full moon hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 181 BARS ANALYSED