The drum beat in No Excuses

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 7, 9 and 11, and 24 more places -- 23.1% 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 hi-hat, snare, mid tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 40 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 69 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 88 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. 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 88, 102 and 117 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.