BLACK DEATH WARRIOR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Weakness

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 81-98 -- 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
140 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
101
LENGTH
2:55
DIFFICULTY
63/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 140 BPM
WEAKNESS · BARS 81-82

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 86 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 63 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 77 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 5 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. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride 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 77, 93, 109, 124 and 140 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 Weakness use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 140 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 81-98. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Weakness hard?

86 out of 100 on its own -- hard. The song as a whole is 63 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 · 101 BARS ANALYSED