The drum beat in Never Fight a Man with a Perm

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 47-62 and 113-128 -- 22.5% 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 and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 68 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 72 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 101 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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, 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 101, 119, 137 and 155 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.