BLESSED EXTINCTION · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Siembra De Cadaveres

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 12-27 and 33-48 -- 25.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
124
LENGTH
3:50
DIFFICULTY
87/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
SIEMBRA DE CADAVERES · BARS 12-13

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 75 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

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 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  4. 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 Siembra De Cadaveres use?

A 2-bar phrase 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 25.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12-27 and 33-48. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Siembra De Cadaveres hard?

75 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 87 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 124 BARS ANALYSED