ROOT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hřbitov

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-16, 18-23 and 46-52, and 1 more place -- 39.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
117
LENGTH
3:34
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
HŘBITOV · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 54 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 70 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 85 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 85, 100, 115 and 130 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 Hřbitov use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-16, 18-23, 46-52 and 54-67. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hřbitov hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 117 BARS ANALYSED