BON JOVI · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Wanted Dead Or Alive

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 2-13, 28-30 and 46-47, and 1 more place -- 25.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
74 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
91
LENGTH
4:52
DIFFICULTY
53/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 74 BPM
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE · BAR 2

It is played on ride, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 53 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 56 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 56, 65 and 74 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 Wanted Dead Or Alive use?

A one-bar groove on ride, kick and hi-hat foot, in 4/4 at 74 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 2-13, 28-30, 46-47 and 87-89. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 5 times over the song.

Is the beat in Wanted Dead Or Alive hard?

21 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 53 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 · 91 BARS ANALYSED