XANTHOCHROID · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Sound Which Has No Name

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 93, 97 and 187, and 13 more places -- 21.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
220 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
382
LENGTH
6:57
DIFFICULTY
76/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 220 BPM
THE SOUND WHICH HAS NO NAME · BAR 298

It is played on crash and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 76 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 165 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, and nothing else. 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 165, 193 and 220 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 Sound Which Has No Name use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 4/4 at 220 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 93, 97, 187 and 201, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 24 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Sound Which Has No Name hard?

22 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 76 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 382 BARS ANALYSED