The drum beat in After Midnight

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 45-47, 49-51 and 85-87, and 9 more places -- 22.7% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

It is played on crash, ride, hi-hat, snare, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 44 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 63 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 126 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. 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 126, 147 and 168 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.