A PERFECT CIRCLE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Doomed

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 42-48, 50-56 and 58-64, and 4 more places -- 35.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
165
LENGTH
4:43
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
THE DOOMED · BARS 42-43

It is played on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 55 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 71 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 91 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 91, 107, 124 and 140 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 Doomed use?

A 2-bar phrase on snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 140 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 35.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 42-48, 50-56, 58-64 and 132-138, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Doomed hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 165 BARS ANALYSED