MEGADETH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Peace Sells

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-24, 32-46 and 48-51, and 5 more places -- 35.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
147
LENGTH
4:16
DIFFICULTY
79/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
PEACE SELLS · BAR 10

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 52 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 79 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 90 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 90, 106, 122 and 138 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 Peace Sells use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-24, 32-46, 48-51 and 58-64, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Peace Sells hard?

52 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 79 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 147 BARS ANALYSED