The drum beat in Lover, You Should've Come Over

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-23, 25-27 and 29-31, and 1 more place -- 28% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 15 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 71 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

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