RIOT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Overkill

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 44-56, 59-72 and 80-91, and 1 more place -- 28.4% 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
207
LENGTH
4:46
DIFFICULTY
50/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 174 BPM
OVERKILL · BAR 44

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 50 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  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 Overkill use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 174 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 44-56, 59-72, 80-91 and 163-177. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Overkill hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 50 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 207 BARS ANALYSED