BLACK SHEEP WALL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in The Wailing And The Gnashing And The Teeth

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 87-115, 200-258 and 260 -- 26.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
145 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
391
LENGTH
8:26
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 145 BPM
THE WAILING AND THE GNASHING AND THE TEETH · BAR 88

It is played on snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 64 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 109 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 109, 127 and 145 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 Wailing And The Gnashing And The Teeth use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 3/4 at 145 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 87-115, 200-258 and 260. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 18 times over the song.

Is the beat in The Wailing And The Gnashing And The Teeth hard?

44 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 64 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in how much of it falls off the beat.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 391 BARS ANALYSED