THE RAMONES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rock 'n' Roll High School

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-9, 46-57 and 64-65, and 1 more place -- 41.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
188 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
104
LENGTH
2:13
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 188 BPM
ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL · BAR 1

It is played on snare, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 26 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 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 141 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 141, 165 and 188 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 'n' Roll High School use?

A one-bar groove on snare, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 188 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-9, 46-57, 64-65 and 84-103. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Rock 'n' Roll High School hard?

26 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 · 104 BARS ANALYSED