FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Hydra

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-7, 9-11 and 13-15, and 7 more places -- 22.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
124
LENGTH
4:12
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
HYDRA · BARS 5-6

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 67 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 90 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 and 120 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 Hydra use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, high tom, mid tom and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9-11, 13-15 and 17-19, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in Hydra hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 124 BARS ANALYSED