Phantoms · Meshuggah

132 bars of 4/4 at 110 BPM, about 4:48 of playing, on crash, ride, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot.

69 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO

110 BPM

TIME

4/4

BARS

132

LENGTH

4:48

DIFFICULTY

69/100

snare through bars 1-41, toms through bars 42-44, snare through bars 45-79, toms through bars 80-81, silence through bars 82-85 and snare through bars 86-99, and 4 more changes after that.

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 41, 53-54 and 65-66, and 1 more place -- 5.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

    53               54
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a 1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
CC |x---x----x-x---x|--x--x------x--x|
SD |--------x-------|--------x-------|
BD |x-x-x-x--x-x-x-x|--x--x-x--x-x--x|
HF |x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|

4 fills to learn, played 81 times: bars 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 75 more.

It cuts the song into 24 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. The grooves the song is built on -- AE, BX -- 2 exercises, about 29 minutes.
2. The grooves the song is built on -- BV (a two-bar phrase) -- 2 exercises, about 28 minutes.
3. Through the Chorus -- 3 exercises, about 88 minutes.
4. Bars 1-96 -- 5 exercises, about 32 minutes.
5. Bars 87-108 -- 6 exercises, about 25 minutes. Open above.
6. Bars 108-115 -- 4 exercises, about 30 minutes.
7. Through the Outro 2 -- 6 exercises, about 23 minutes.
8. The whole song -- 1 exercise, about 10 minutes.