X JAPAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Silent Jealousy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-19, 21-25 and 37-43, and 13 more places -- 35.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
105 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
300
LENGTH
11:26
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 105 BPM
SILENT JEALOUSY · BAR 14

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 54 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 70 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 68 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, 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 68, 81, 93 and 105 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 Silent Jealousy use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 105 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 13-19, 21-25, 37-43 and 45-51, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 21 times over the song.

Is the beat in Silent Jealousy hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 300 BARS ANALYSED