The drum beat in Drag The Waters

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 13-15, 17-19 and 21-23, and 9 more places -- 21.9% 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, snare, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 30 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 58 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 94 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, 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 94, 109 and 125 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.