TOOL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in H.

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 17-31, 33 and 35, and 4 more places -- 25% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
99 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
151
LENGTH
6:06
DIFFICULTY
68/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 99 BPM
H. · BARS 17-18

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 55 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 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 64 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 64, 76, 87 and 99 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 H. use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 99 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-31, 33, 35 and 41-43, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in H. hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. 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 · 151 BARS ANALYSED