MACHINE HEAD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR AI

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-20 and 132-154 -- 26.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
72 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
154
LENGTH
8:27
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 72 BPM
SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR AI · BAR 5

It is played on the kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 0 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 67 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 54 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

Tempo goes 54, 63 and 72 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 SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR AI use?

A one-bar groove on kick, in 4/4 at 72 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-20 and 132-154. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 15 times over the song.

Is the beat in SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR AI hard?

0 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 154 BARS ANALYSED