Hold The Line · Toto

95 bars of 6/4 -- not four -- at 97 BPM, 5:49 of playing on crash, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot.

54 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO

97 BPM

TIME

6/4

BARS

95

LENGTH

5:49

DIFFICULTY

54/100

snare through bars 1-3, hi-hat through bars 4-65 and silence through bars 66-95.

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 10-18, 28 and 30, and 3 more places -- 28.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

    10                       11
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a5e+a6e+a 1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a5e+a6e+a
CC |x-----------------------|------------------------|
HH |--x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
SD |------x-----------x-----|------x-----------x-----|
BD |x---x---x-x-x---x---x-x-|x---x---x-x-x---x---x---|

9 fills to learn, played 13 times: bars 3, 9, 19, 25, 26, 27 and 7 more.

It cuts the song into 25 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. The grooves the song is built on -- G -- 3 exercises, about 20 minutes.
2. The grooves the song is built on -- D -- 3 exercises, about 19 minutes.
3. The grooves the song is built on -- E -- 5 exercises, about 26 minutes.
4. Through Part G and Part D -- 5 exercises, about 31 minutes.
5. Through Part D and Part G -- 5 exercises, about 30 minutes. Open above.
6. Through Part D and the Outro -- 7 exercises, about 35 minutes.
7. Through the Outro and the Outro 2 -- 6 exercises, about 21 minutes.
8. The whole song -- 1 exercise, about 10 minutes.