TOOL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ticks & Leeches

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3 and 5-12 -- 15.1% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
7/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
6:43
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
TICKS & LEECHES · BAR 1

It is played on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 52 out of 100 -- a step up -- 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 104 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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 104, 123, 141 and 160 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 Ticks & Leeches use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, in 7/4 at 160 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 15.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3 and 5-12. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ticks & Leeches hard?

52 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 64 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 · 145 BARS ANALYSED