BLACK SABBATH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Paranoid (Live)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-8, 10-12 and 14-16, and 22 more places -- 65.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
172 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
131
LENGTH
3:03
DIFFICULTY
17/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 172 BPM
PARANOID (LIVE) · BAR 6

It is played on snare and mid tom, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 17 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 129 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 129, 151 and 172 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 Paranoid (Live) use?

A one-bar groove on snare and mid tom, in 4/4 at 172 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 65.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-8, 10-12, 14-16 and 18-24, and 21 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Paranoid (Live) hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 17 out of 100: straightforward, and the one thing to watch is how often it moves around the kit.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 131 BARS ANALYSED