ME · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in metal bass

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 58, 60 and 62, and 2 more places -- 34.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
174 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
83
LENGTH
1:54
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
METAL BASS · BAR 66

It is played on the kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 41 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 131 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 131, 152 and 174 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 metal bass use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 58, 60, 62 and 64, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in metal bass hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 83 BARS ANALYSED