SHAKIN' STEVENS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in This Ole House

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3, 5-11 and 13-24, and 3 more places -- 54.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
195 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
142
LENGTH
2:55
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 195 BPM
THIS OLE HOUSE · BAR 3

It is played on snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 15 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 41 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.

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 This Ole House use?

A one-bar groove on snare and kick, in 4/4 at 195 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 54.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3, 5-11, 13-24 and 41-56, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the snare to start with, and it changes 7 times over the song.

Is the beat in This Ole House hard?

15 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 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 · 142 BARS ANALYSED