THE BLACK MAGES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Those Who Fight Further

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 43-49, 51-57 and 59-61, and 5 more places -- 21.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
162 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
175
LENGTH
4:19
DIFFICULTY
77/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 162 BPM
THOSE WHO FIGHT FURTHER · BARS 43-44

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 54 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 77 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 105 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, hi-hat 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 105, 124, 143 and 162 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 Those Who Fight Further use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 162 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 21.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 43-49, 51-57, 59-61 and 63-64, and 4 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Those Who Fight Further hard?

54 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 77 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 175 BARS ANALYSED