PRIMITIVE MAN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Sterility

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 40-46, 48 and 50-54, and 24 more places -- 38.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
145 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
150
LENGTH
4:07
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 145 BPM
STERILITY · BAR 40

It is played on crash and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 7 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 73 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 109 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 109, 127 and 145 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 Sterility use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 4/4 at 145 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 38.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 40-46, 48, 50-54 and 56, and 23 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Sterility hard?

7 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 150 BARS ANALYSED