Beat It On Down The Line · Grateful Dead

114 bars at 170 BPM -- fast, and 2:41 of it without a break -- on crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot.

Rock150 BPM and up
TEMPO
170 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
114
LENGTH
2:41
DIFFICULTY
54/100
THE BEAT

One bar, and 72% of the song

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-7, 28-31 and 36-39, and 2 more places -- 71.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

LOOP · 170 BPM
BEAT IT ON DOWN THE LINE · BAR 1
THE BEAT, WRITTEN OUT →
THE SHAPE

How the song is built

114 bars across 11 sections: 104 keep time. The longest unbroken stretch of time is bars 81-114.

CHORUS
PART D
CHORUS 4
OUTRO 2
5 groovesADCBEFill into the next barFill that ends a sectionInto the next partStop / hitRest

Questions

What BPM is Beat It On Down The Line?

170 BPM, in 4/4, with the time kept in sixteenth notes. At that speed the sixteenth notes are the whole difficulty, so the room will take it down to a quarter of it and climb back.

Is Beat It On Down The Line hard to play on drums?

54 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet. The beat itself is 41 out of 100; the rest of the number is everything around it.

How long is the drum part?

114 bars, about 2:41 at the written tempo. The course breaks it into 22 exercises over 6 sittings, about 26 minutes each.

What do I need on the kit?

crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot. That is most of a full kit; the part moves around it rather than sitting in one place.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 114 BARS ANALYSED
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