ALL THAT REMAINS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Deepest Gray

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-16, 26-33 and 76-81, and 3 more places -- 26.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
196 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
152
LENGTH
3:06
DIFFICULTY
52/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 196 BPM
THE DEEPEST GRAY · BAR 11

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 20 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 52 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 147 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 147, 172 and 196 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 Deepest Gray use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 196 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-16, 26-33, 76-81 and 84-89, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Deepest Gray hard?

20 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 52 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 152 BARS ANALYSED