The drum beat in Danger Line

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 53-67, 97-103 and 105-111, and 2 more places -- 25.5% 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 thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 82 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 72 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 100 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 100, 121, 141, 162 and 182 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.