DIRTY LOOPS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Rock You!

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 21-31, 43 and 49, and 6 more places -- 23% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
170 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
158
LENGTH
3:42
DIFFICULTY
76/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 170 BPM
ROCK YOU! · BAR 24

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 49 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 76 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 128 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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 128, 149 and 170 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 You! use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 170 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 23% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 21-31, 43, 49 and 51-57, and 5 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in Rock You! hard?

49 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 76 out of 100: demanding, mostly on how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 158 BARS ANALYSED