SABATON · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Valley Of Death

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-11, 14-15 and 51-52, and 7 more places -- 19.4% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
156 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
161
LENGTH
4:08
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 156 BPM
THE VALLEY OF DEATH · BAR 121

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 46 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 not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 117 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 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 117, 137 and 156 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 Valley Of Death use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 156 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 19.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-11, 14-15, 51-52 and 55, and 6 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 29 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Valley Of Death hard?

46 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 · 161 BARS ANALYSED