CULT OF LUNA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ghost Trail

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 81-176 -- 28.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
110 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
341
LENGTH
12:24
DIFFICULTY
37/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 110 BPM
GHOST TRAIL · BAR 81

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 13 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 37 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 83 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 83, 96 and 110 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 Ghost Trail use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 110 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 81-176. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ghost Trail hard?

13 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 37 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 · 341 BARS ANALYSED