BONNIE TYLER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Holding Out For A Hero

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-11, 13-19 and 21-35, and 15 more places -- 78.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
150 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
215
LENGTH
5:44
DIFFICULTY
76/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 150 BPM
HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO · BAR 1

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 76 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 98 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 98, 115, 133 and 150 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 Holding Out For A Hero use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 150 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 78.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-11, 13-19, 21-35 and 37-51, and 14 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 2 times over the song.

Is the beat in Holding Out For A Hero hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 76 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 215 BARS ANALYSED