The drum beat in Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 48-89, 103 and 105-111, and 1 more place -- 50% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

It is played on hi-hat and kick, 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 67 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 135 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. 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 135, 158 and 180 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.