AC/DC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rock Or Bust

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-41, 43 and 45, and 13 more places -- 86.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
195 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
148
LENGTH
3:02
DIFFICULTY
43/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 195 BPM
ROCK OR BUST · BAR 6

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 43 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 146 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, 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 146, 171 and 195 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 Or Bust use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 195 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 86.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-41, 43, 45 and 47, and 12 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 3 times over the song.

Is the beat in Rock Or Bust hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 43 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 · 148 BARS ANALYSED