AVENGED SEVENFOLD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Magic

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-4, 6-8 and 10-16, and 1 more place -- 17.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
119
LENGTH
3:40
DIFFICULTY
78/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
MAGIC · BAR 2

It is played on snare, high tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 65 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 78 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 85 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 85, 100, 115 and 130 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 Magic use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-4, 6-8, 10-16 and 31-37. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Magic hard?

65 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 78 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 119 BARS ANALYSED