The drum beat in 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-21, 38-56 and 73-82 -- 61% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

It is played on hi-hat, snare, high tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 62 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 70 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 68 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

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, hi-hat 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 68, 81, 93 and 105 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.