GREAT WHITE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rock Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 163-169, 171-173 and 175-176, and 14 more places -- 17.8% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
144 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
251
LENGTH
6:58
DIFFICULTY
74/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 144 BPM
ROCK ME · BAR 164

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 43 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 74 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 108 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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, ride 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 108, 126 and 144 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 Rock Me use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 144 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 163-169, 171-173, 175-176 and 179-181, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 12 times over the song.

Is the beat in Rock Me hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 74 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 251 BARS ANALYSED