IGORRR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Headbutt

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 45-47, 49-50 and 53-54, and 17 more places -- 30.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
190 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
172
LENGTH
3:37
DIFFICULTY
81/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 190 BPM
HEADBUTT · BAR 49

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 32 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 81 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 143 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 143, 166 and 190 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 Headbutt use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 190 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 45-47, 49-50, 53-54 and 57-58, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 17 times over the song.

Is the beat in Headbutt hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 81 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 172 BARS ANALYSED