The drum beat in A Way Out

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 6-8, 10-12 and 14-16, and 5 more places -- 30% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on hi-hat, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 72 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 76 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 45 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 45, 54, 64, 73 and 82 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.