The drum beat in Off The Wall

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25-27, 29-31 and 50-52, and 7 more places -- 35% 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 33 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 89 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. 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.
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 89, 104 and 119 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.