DARK DIVINE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sinfestation

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3, 5-7 and 27, and 14 more places -- 26.7% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
154 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
2:33
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 154 BPM
SINFESTATION · BAR 7

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 25 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 53 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 116 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 116, 135 and 154 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 Sinfestation use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 154 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3, 5-7, 27 and 29, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sinfestation hard?

25 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 53 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 98 BARS ANALYSED