GOJIRA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Grind

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9, 30 and 66-69, and 17 more places -- 31.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
106 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
137
LENGTH
5:19
DIFFICULTY
78/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 106 BPM
GRIND · BAR 67

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 18 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 78 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 80 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, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 80, 93 and 106 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 Grind use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 106 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9, 30, 66-69 and 71-72, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Grind hard?

18 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 78 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 137 BARS ANALYSED