TOOL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Triad

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-52 -- 68.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
108 BPM
TIME
6/4
BARS
114
LENGTH
6:18
DIFFICULTY
78/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 108 BPM
TRIAD · BAR 1

It is played on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 76 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 78 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 59 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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 59, 72, 84, 96 and 108 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 Triad use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 6/4 at 108 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 68.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-52. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Triad hard?

76 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 78 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 114 BARS ANALYSED