DYING IN PARALLEL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Metalcore.

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 25-39, 71-83 and 113-134 -- 36.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
4:18
DIFFICULTY
65/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
METALCORE. · BARS 25-26

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 46 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

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 101 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 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 Metalcore. use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 36.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-39, 71-83 and 113-134. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Metalcore. hard?

46 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. 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 · 145 BARS ANALYSED