AVENGED SEVENFOLD · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Fight

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-7, 27-33 and 64-70, and 1 more place -- 27.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
102
LENGTH
4:05
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
THE FIGHT · BARS 1-2

It is played on crash, ride, snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth 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 60 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 65 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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. 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 65, 77, 88 and 100 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 Fight use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-7, 27-33, 64-70 and 84-90. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Fight hard?

55 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 60 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 · 102 BARS ANALYSED