OLD GODS OF ASGARD [FEAT. ALAN WAKE & MR. DOOR] · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Herald of Darkness

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 15-22, 27-34 and 37-52, and 13 more places -- 33.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
156 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
524
LENGTH
13:26
DIFFICULTY
59/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 156 BPM
HERALD OF DARKNESS · BARS 15-16

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 the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 59 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 117 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 117, 137 and 156 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 Herald of Darkness use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 156 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 33.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 15-22, 27-34, 37-52 and 55-69, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 28 times over the song.

Is the beat in Herald of Darkness hard?

47 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 59 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 524 BARS ANALYSED