MESHUGGAH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Swarm

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 7, 10 and 12, and 21 more places -- 15.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
171
LENGTH
5:04
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
SWARM · BAR 24

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 53 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 66 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 88 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 88, 104, 119 and 135 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 Swarm use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7, 10, 12 and 15-17, and 20 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Swarm hard?

53 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 171 BARS ANALYSED