HAGGARD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Per Aspera Ad Astra

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 65-68, 70 and 72-73, and 18 more places -- 19.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
269
LENGTH
5:01
DIFFICULTY
49/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
PER ASPERA AD ASTRA · BAR 65

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 49 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 131, 153 and 175 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 Per Aspera Ad Astra use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 3/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 65-68, 70, 72-73 and 76-79, and 17 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 23 times over the song.

Is the beat in Per Aspera Ad Astra hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 49 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 · 269 BARS ANALYSED