TOOL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ænema

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 84-106, 124-146 and 148-150, and 1 more place -- 27.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
122 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
199
LENGTH
6:17
DIFFICULTY
81/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 122 BPM
ÆNEMA · BAR 102

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 78 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 81 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 67 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

Tempo goes 67, 81, 95, 108 and 122 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 Ænema use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 3/4 at 122 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 84-106, 124-146, 148-150 and 187-190. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ænema hard?

78 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 81 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 199 BARS ANALYSED