MEGADETH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Reckoning Day

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-15 and 105-136 -- 34.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
136
LENGTH
4:32
DIFFICULTY
75/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
RECKONING DAY · BAR 2

It is played on hi-hat and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 61 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 75 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 78 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 78, 92, 106 and 120 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 Reckoning Day use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 34.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-15 and 105-136. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Reckoning Day hard?

61 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 75 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 136 BARS ANALYSED