The drum beat in Michael Jackson

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-9, 13-35 and 37-42, and 3 more places -- 56.2% 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, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 23 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 49 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 60 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, 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 60, 70 and 80 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.