ALTERNATIVE COMPETITION 6 · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Howl At Midnight

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-5 and 8-20 -- 38.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
80 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
68
LENGTH
3:24
DIFFICULTY
15/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 80 BPM
HOWL AT MIDNIGHT · BAR 1

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 4 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 15 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 60 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 60, 70 and 80 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 Howl At Midnight use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 80 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-5 and 8-20. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Howl At Midnight hard?

4 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 15 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how little of it repeats.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 68 BARS ANALYSED