The drum beat in Holy Diver

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-12, 14-16 and 23-25, and 4 more places -- 17.8% 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 hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 45 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 75 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 69 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. 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.
2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 69, 81 and 92 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.