The drum beat in Better Half

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-40, 73-100 and 121-124 -- 54.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

It is played on hi-hat, snare, mid tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 34 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 110 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, 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 110, 129 and 147 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.