CARPATHIAN FOREST · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in In League With Satan

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-50, 65-91 and 93, and 4 more places -- 39.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
239
LENGTH
5:27
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
IN LEAGUE WITH SATAN · BAR 28

It is played on floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 65 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 131 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 131, 153 and 175 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 In League With Satan use?

A one-bar groove on floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 39.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 27-50, 65-91, 93 and 109, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in In League With Satan hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 239 BARS ANALYSED