BLACK SABBATH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Headless Cross

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5, and 36 more places -- 29.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
88 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
143
LENGTH
6:30
DIFFICULTY
79/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 88 BPM
HEADLESS CROSS · BAR 1

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 47 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 79 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 66 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. 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 66, 77 and 88 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 Headless Cross use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 88 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 5 and 7, and 35 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Headless Cross hard?

47 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 79 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 143 BARS ANALYSED