The drum beat in Nothing On My Back

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 30-36, 61-67 and 115-121 -- 18.8% 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, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 42 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 65 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 126 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, ride 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 126, 147 and 168 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.