The drum beat in Epidemic

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 4, 6 and 8, and 11 more places -- 29.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 70 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 79 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

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 133 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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 133, 157, 181 and 205 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.