THERION · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Kali Yuga Pt. II

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5, and 27 more places -- 38.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
220
LENGTH
5:30
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
KALI YUGA PT. II · BAR 25

It is played on crash, 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 how many notes a second it asks for.

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 120 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. 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 120, 140 and 160 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 Kali Yuga Pt. II use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 5 and 7, and 26 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 20 times over the song.

Is the beat in Kali Yuga Pt. II hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 65 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 220 BARS ANALYSED