ANCIENT NORTH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hated By The Gods

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-32, 49-64 and 93-156 -- 62.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
125 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
156
LENGTH
5:00
DIFFICULTY
88/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 125 BPM
HATED BY THE GODS · BAR 18

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 73 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 88 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 69 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 69, 83, 97, 111 and 125 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 Hated By The Gods use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 125 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 62.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-32, 49-64 and 93-156. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hated By The Gods hard?

73 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 88 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 156 BARS ANALYSED