DEICIDE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sacrificial Suicide

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 34-35, 38-39 and 42-43, and 5 more places -- 16.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:19
DIFFICULTY
97/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
SACRIFICIAL SUICIDE · BAR 34

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 88 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 97 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 72 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, hi-hat 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 72, 86, 101, 115 and 130 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 Sacrificial Suicide use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 16.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 34-35, 38-39, 42-43 and 46-47, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sacrificial Suicide hard?

88 out of 100 on its own -- hard. The song as a whole is 97 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 104 BARS ANALYSED