GUNS N' ROSES · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in So Fine

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 38-44, 46-50 and 61-67, and 1 more place -- 28.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
70 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
85
LENGTH
4:51
DIFFICULTY
57/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 70 BPM
SO FINE · BARS 38-39

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 29 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 57 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 53 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. 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 53, 61 and 70 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 So Fine use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 70 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 28.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 38-44, 46-50, 61-67 and 69-73. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in So Fine hard?

29 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 57 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 · 85 BARS ANALYSED