AC/DC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in High Voltage

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 7-70, 72-104 and 106-140 -- 93.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
137 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
141
LENGTH
4:07
DIFFICULTY
49/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 137 BPM
HIGH VOLTAGE · BAR 9

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 32 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 49 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 103 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 103, 120 and 137 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 High Voltage use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 137 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 93.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 7-70, 72-104 and 106-140. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in High Voltage hard?

32 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 49 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 · 141 BARS ANALYSED