The drum beat in Is Fuair an Chroí

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 12-15, 24-46 and 68-74, and 1 more place -- 46.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 75 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 80 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 40 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, 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 40, 46, 53, 61 and 69 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.