MEGADETH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rattlehead

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 88-94, 96-98 and 100-101, and 5 more places -- 21.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
183 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
158
LENGTH
3:28
DIFFICULTY
100/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 183 BPM
RATTLEHEAD · BAR 89

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 87 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 100 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 101 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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 101, 121, 142, 162 and 183 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 Rattlehead use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 183 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 88-94, 96-98, 100-101 and 112-114, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Rattlehead hard?

87 out of 100 on its own -- hard. The song as a whole is 100 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED