SYSTEM OF A DOWN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Soldier Side

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 49-55 and 57-63 -- 31.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
75 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
65
LENGTH
3:28
DIFFICULTY
56/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 75 BPM
SOLDIER SIDE · BAR 49

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 51 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 56 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 49 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, 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 49, 58, 66 and 75 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 Soldier Side use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 75 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 49-55 and 57-63. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Soldier Side hard?

51 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 56 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 65 BARS ANALYSED