TANK · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Shellshock (Good Version)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-22 -- 21.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
3:28
DIFFICULTY
89/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
SHELLSHOCK (GOOD VERSION) · BAR 5

It is played on mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 89 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 90 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 105 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 Shellshock (Good Version) use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-22. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Shellshock (Good Version) hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 89 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