The drum beat in Mama

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-30, 51-56 and 59-61, and 1 more place -- 15.2% 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 crash, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 22 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 52 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 79 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, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 79, 92 and 105 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.