BRAIN DRAIN · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rock On

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 12-16, 18 and 20, and 17 more places -- 31.9% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
138 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
116
LENGTH
3:22
DIFFICULTY
71/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 138 BPM
ROCK ON · BAR 12

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 53 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 71 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 90 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 90, 106, 122 and 138 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 On use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 138 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 31.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 12-16, 18, 20 and 24-25, and 16 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 22 times over the song.

Is the beat in Rock On hard?

53 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 71 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 116 BARS ANALYSED