ANTIPIG · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Cannibal

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 22, 24-25 and 27-28, and 4 more places -- 24.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
157
LENGTH
3:37
DIFFICULTY
73/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
THE CANNIBAL · BAR 24

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

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 131 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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 131, 153 and 175 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 The Cannibal use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 24.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 22, 24-25, 27-28 and 30-31, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Cannibal hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 73 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED