The drum beat in Fast Road

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 36-73, 76-105 and 108-114, and 6 more places -- 55.8% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 58 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 71 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 168 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, hi-hat 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 168, 199, 229 and 259 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.