The drum beat in Altered State

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 3-13, 99-100 and 200-202, and 3 more places -- 17.1% 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, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 47 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 69 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

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 115 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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, and nothing else. 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 115, 134 and 153 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.