Rock Steady
Aretha Franklin · 1971
Home to a legendary Purdie drum break that is a rite of passage for funk ghost-note vocabulary.
- Artist
- Aretha Franklin
- Year
- 1971
- Genre
- funk
- Drummer
- Bernard Purdie
- Tempo
- 98 bpm
- Time
- 4/4
- Feel
- funk with drum break
- Difficulty
- advanced
Drummer's Quick-Start
Practice tempos
Woodshed
58bpm
Building
78bpm
Target
98bpm
The feel
A funk with drum break in 4/4 around 98 BPM. A comfortable mid-tempo — lock the backbeat first, then shape the dynamics.
What to watch
- •Keep the ghost notes a whisper — felt, not heard. They make the groove breathe.
- •Funk lives in the hi-hat and the ghosted snare — tighten those before the backbeat.
- •Advanced: isolate the single hardest bar and loop it slowly before ever playing along.
How to learn it
Well-known tutorials exist for this one — use the links below, and play along from your own copy.
Generated from this song's groove profile — analysis only, no notation. A human-reviewed AI brief with a full groove breakdown, key moments and song map replaces this as briefs roll out.
Learn it
Find drum tutorials on YouTube ↗iDrum links to where lessons already live — we don't host recordings or publish transcriptions. Play along from your own music.
Discussion
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