The drum beat in Hocus Pocus

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-22, 24-26 and 29-32, and 20 more places -- 51% 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 43 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 50 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 139 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, 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.

Tempo goes 139, 162 and 185 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.