The drum beat in Gutter Ballet

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 46, 48-51 and 73-75, and 9 more places -- 16.8% 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, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 32 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 40 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

There is not much to reduce here -- the room opens it near enough as written, at 40 BPM, and asks for it clean before it moves.

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.

Two tempos only, 40 and 20 BPM, and the gate at each is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.