AC/DC · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Walk All Over You

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-34, 37-38 and 41-42, and 14 more places -- 47.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
81 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
168
LENGTH
8:18
DIFFICULTY
44/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 81 BPM
WALK ALL OVER YOU · BAR 25

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 44 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 61 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 61, 71 and 81 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 Walk All Over You use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 81 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 47.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 25-34, 37-38, 41-42 and 45-46, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 13 times over the song.

Is the beat in Walk All Over You hard?

23 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 44 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 · 168 BARS ANALYSED