PANTERA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Throes Of Rejection

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 3-5, 7-8 and 11-13, and 11 more places -- 22.2% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
160
LENGTH
4:37
DIFFICULTY
72/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
THROES OF REJECTION · BAR 3

It is played on mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 59 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 72 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 90 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 90, 106, 122 and 138 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 Throes Of Rejection use?

A one-bar groove on mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 3-5, 7-8, 11-13 and 15-16, and 10 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 16 times over the song.

Is the beat in Throes Of Rejection hard?

59 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 72 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 160 BARS ANALYSED