AC/DC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Demon Fire

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-34, 39-70 and 75-104, and 1 more place -- 77.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
160 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
139
LENGTH
3:28
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 160 BPM
DEMON FIRE · BAR 12

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 47 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 61 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 120 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 120, 140 and 160 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 Demon Fire use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 160 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 77.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-34, 39-70, 75-104 and 111-132. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Demon Fire hard?

47 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 61 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 · 139 BARS ANALYSED