MEGADETH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Take No Prisoners

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 63-74 and 89-99 -- 18.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
131
LENGTH
3:17
DIFFICULTY
80/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
TAKE NO PRISONERS · BARS 63-64

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 76 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 80 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

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 5 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride 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 88, 106, 124, 142 and 160 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 Take No Prisoners use?

A 2-bar phrase on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 63-74 and 89-99. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Take No Prisoners hard?

76 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 80 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 131 BARS ANALYSED