OZZY OSBOURNE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Crazy Train

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 19, 21 and 23-25, and 12 more places -- 25.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
165
LENGTH
4:47
DIFFICULTY
89/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
CRAZY TRAIN · BAR 24

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 78 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 89 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

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 76 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 76, 91, 107, 122 and 138 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 Crazy Train use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 19, 21, 23-25 and 27-29, and 11 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Crazy Train hard?

78 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 89 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 165 BARS ANALYSED