ANNIHILATOR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hunter Killer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 103-109, 111-117 and 119-121, and 13 more places -- 29% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
198 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
280
LENGTH
5:39
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 198 BPM
HUNTER KILLER · BAR 104

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 49 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 61 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 149 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 149, 173 and 198 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 Hunter Killer use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 198 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 103-109, 111-117, 119-121 and 123-125, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hunter Killer hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 280 BARS ANALYSED