BILLY JOEL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Still Rock And Roll To Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-32, 51-62 and 75-85 -- 29.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
139 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
2:49
DIFFICULTY
55/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 139 BPM
STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME · BAR 51

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 45 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 55 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 104 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 104, 122 and 139 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 Still Rock And Roll To Me use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 139 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 27-32, 51-62 and 75-85. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Still Rock And Roll To Me hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 55 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 · 98 BARS ANALYSED