MARTY FRIEDMAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Illumination

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-14 and 37 -- 16.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
70 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
69
LENGTH
3:49
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 70 BPM
ILLUMINATION · BAR 7

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 30 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 55 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 53 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. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 53, 61 and 70 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 Illumination use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 70 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-14 and 37. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Illumination hard?

30 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 69 BARS ANALYSED