The drum beat in Phantom Lord

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 25, 31 and 37-39, and 16 more places -- 27% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 49 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 73 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

There is not much to reduce here -- the room opens it near enough as written, at 40 BPM, and asks for it clean before it moves.

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.

Two tempos only, 40 and 30 BPM, and the gate at each is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.