HARMS WAY · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Infestation

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-11, 13-15 and 17-19, and 2 more places -- 18.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
108
LENGTH
3:12
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
INFESTATION · BARS 5-6

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 56 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 101 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 101, 118 and 135 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 Infestation use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-11, 13-15, 17-19 and 21-23, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in Infestation hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 56 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 · 108 BARS ANALYSED