MANOWAR · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Wheels Of Fire

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-20, 30-32 and 34, and 10 more places -- 53.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
175 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
155
LENGTH
3:33
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 175 BPM
WHEELS OF FIRE · BAR 9

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 44 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 131 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 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 131, 153 and 175 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 Wheels Of Fire use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 175 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 53.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-20, 30-32, 34 and 36, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Wheels Of Fire hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with how many notes a second it asks for the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 155 BARS ANALYSED