ISRA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hit The Beast (Demo)

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 36, 38-44 and 46-50 -- 19.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
66
LENGTH
1:44
DIFFICULTY
32/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
HIT THE BEAST (DEMO) · BARS 38-39

It is played on crash, snare, mid tom and floor tom, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 32 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 113 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, 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 113, 131 and 150 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 Hit The Beast (Demo) use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare, mid tom and floor tom, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 36, 38-44 and 46-50. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hit The Beast (Demo) hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how often it moves around the kit the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 68 BARS ANALYSED