ACCEPT · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Son Of A Bitch

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 54-56, 58-60 and 70-72, and 8 more places -- 26.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
130 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
126
LENGTH
3:49
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 130 BPM
SON OF A BITCH · BAR 54

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 64 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 98 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 98, 114 and 130 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 Son Of A Bitch use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 130 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 26.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 54-56, 58-60, 70-72 and 74-76, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 26 times over the song.

Is the beat in Son Of A Bitch hard?

42 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 64 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 · 126 BARS ANALYSED