The drum beat in Over My Head (Better Off Dead)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 29-31 and 33-35, and 6 more places -- 32.1% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on ride, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 45 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

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 138 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 138, 161 and 184 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.