The drum beat in Fixation On The Darkness

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 39-41, 43-45 and 47-49, and 5 more places -- 17.7% 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, ride, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 50 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 68 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 87 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. 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 87, 103, 118 and 134 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.