KISS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Detroit Rock City Ver Greatest Kiss

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 17-32, 45-60 and 90-105, and 1 more place -- 37.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
181 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
168
LENGTH
3:43
DIFFICULTY
70/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 181 BPM
DETROIT ROCK CITY VER GREATEST KISS · BARS 17-18

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 59 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 70 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 118 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. 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.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 118, 139, 160 and 181 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 Detroit Rock City Ver Greatest Kiss use?

A 2-bar phrase on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 181 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 37.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 17-32, 45-60, 90-105 and 142-155. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Detroit Rock City Ver Greatest Kiss hard?

59 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 70 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 168 BARS ANALYSED