ELTON JOHN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Crocodile Rock

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-27, 39-42 and 51-67, and 1 more place -- 30.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
151 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
146
LENGTH
3:52
DIFFICULTY
54/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 151 BPM
CROCODILE ROCK · BAR 11

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 54 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 113 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. 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 113, 132 and 151 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 Crocodile Rock use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 151 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 30.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-27, 39-42, 51-67 and 79-82. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Crocodile Rock hard?

41 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 54 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 · 146 BARS ANALYSED