AC/DC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Highway To Hell

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-24, 37-43 and 46, and 1 more place -- 31.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
116 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
95
LENGTH
3:15
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 116 BPM
HIGHWAY TO HELL · BAR 8

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 39 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 53 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 87 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. 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 87, 102 and 116 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 Highway To Hell use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 116 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-24, 37-43, 46 and 50. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Highway To Hell hard?

39 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 95 BARS ANALYSED