The drum beat in Cry of the Black Birds

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 49-55, 57-63 and 65-71, and 5 more places -- 33.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 77 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 84 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 95 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, ride 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 95, 115, 134, 154 and 173 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.