PERDOLET · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Death Dance

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-19, 21 and 23, and 13 more places -- 30.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
180 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
210
LENGTH
4:40
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 180 BPM
THE DEATH DANCE · BAR 17

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 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 44 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 135 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 135, 158 and 180 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 Death Dance use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 180 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-19, 21, 23 and 27, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Death Dance hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how many notes a second it asks for the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 210 BARS ANALYSED