The drum beat in Death Of John Smith

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 52-53, 55-57 and 59-61, and 17 more places -- 26.4% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 81 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 82 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 165 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, 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 165, 199, 233, 266 and 300 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.