PANTERA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Regular People (Conceit)

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 112-122, 124-126 and 128-138, and 1 more place -- 17% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
116 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
169
LENGTH
5:50
DIFFICULTY
87/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 116 BPM
REGULAR PEOPLE (CONCEIT) · BARS 112-113

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 65 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 87 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 75 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 75, 89, 102 and 116 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 Regular People (Conceit) use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 116 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 112-122, 124-126, 128-138 and 140-142. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Regular People (Conceit) hard?

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

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 169 BARS ANALYSED