ACCEPT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in I Wanna Be No Hero

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3, 5-11 and 46-52, and 2 more places -- 27.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
136
LENGTH
4:02
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
I WANNA BE NO HERO · BAR 1

It is played on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 46 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 101 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, and nothing else. 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 101, 118 and 135 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 I Wanna Be No Hero use?

A one-bar groove on snare, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 27.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3, 5-11, 46-52 and 79-92, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in I Wanna Be No Hero hard?

35 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 46 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 · 136 BARS ANALYSED