HFC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Gates Of Hell

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-7 and 32-45 -- 32.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
82
LENGTH
2:31
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
GATES OF HELL · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 68 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 98 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 98, 114 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 Gates Of Hell use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-7 and 32-45. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Gates Of Hell hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 68 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 82 BARS ANALYSED