BOLT THROWER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The IVth Crusade (my version)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 18, 20 and 22, and 31 more places -- 19.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
174
LENGTH
5:21
DIFFICULTY
66/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
THE IVTH CRUSADE (MY VERSION) · BAR 18

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 16 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 66 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 98 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 98, 114 and 130 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 IVth Crusade (my version) use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 18, 20, 22 and 24, and 30 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in The IVth Crusade (my version) hard?

16 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 66 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 174 BARS ANALYSED