The Necromancer · Castle Crashers

86 bars at 180 BPM -- fast, and 1:55 of it without a break -- on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick.

56 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO

180 BPM

TIME

4/4

BARS

86

LENGTH

1:55

DIFFICULTY

56/100

silence through bars 1-4, snare through bars 5-16, hi-hat through bars 17-20, snare through bars 21-36, hi-hat through bars 37-40 and snare through bars 41-60, and 4 more changes after that.

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 21-23, 41-43 and 49-55, and 2 more places -- 34.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

    21               22
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a 1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
CC |x-----x-----x---|--x-----x---x---|
SD |x-----x-----x---|--x-----x---x---|
BD |xxx---xxx---xxx-|--xxx---xxx-xxx-|

2 fills to learn, played 2 times: bars 8 and 78.

It cuts the song into 25 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. The grooves the song is built on -- G, D -- 2 exercises, about 27 minutes.
2. Through Part B and Part D -- 5 exercises, about 23 minutes.
3. Through Part D -- 2 exercises, about 18 minutes.
4. Bars 15-21 -- 4 exercises, about 29 minutes. Open above.
5. Bars 21-48 -- 4 exercises, about 27 minutes.
6. Bars 49-71 -- 5 exercises, about 24 minutes.
7. Through the Outro and the Outro 2 -- 4 exercises, about 26 minutes.
8. The whole song -- 2 exercises, about 15 minutes.