NIFELHEIM · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sodomizer

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 37-52, 71-86 and 129-144, and 1 more place -- 31.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
120 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
216
LENGTH
7:11
DIFFICULTY
62/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 120 BPM
SODOMIZER · BAR 37

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 46 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 62 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 90 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. 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, and nothing else. 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 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 Sodomizer use?

A one-bar groove on crash, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 120 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 37-52, 71-86, 129-144 and 201-216. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sodomizer hard?

46 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 62 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 · 216 BARS ANALYSED