DAVID BOWIE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rebel Rebel

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 9-15 and 17-31, and 11 more places -- 82.7% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
128 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
139
LENGTH
4:21
DIFFICULTY
34/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 128 BPM
REBEL REBEL · BAR 6

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 17 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 34 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 96 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 96, 112 and 128 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 Rebel Rebel use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 128 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 82.7% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9-15, 17-31 and 33-35, and 10 more places.

Is the beat in Rebel Rebel hard?

17 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 34 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 139 BARS ANALYSED