HELLOWEEN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Paint a new world

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 7-8, 10-12 and 47-49, and 13 more places -- 27.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
153 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
171
LENGTH
4:28
DIFFICULTY
88/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 153 BPM
PAINT A NEW WORLD · BAR 8

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth 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 88 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 84 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 84, 101, 119, 136 and 153 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 Paint a new world use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 153 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7-8, 10-12, 47-49 and 51-53, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Paint a new world hard?

78 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 88 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 171 BARS ANALYSED