Pick Up the Pieces · Burning Spear

223 bars at 160 BPM -- fast, and 5:32 of it without a break -- on crash, hi-hat, snare, mid tom and kick.

64 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

TEMPO

160 BPM

TIME

4/4

BARS

223

LENGTH

5:32

DIFFICULTY

64/100

toms through bars 1-4, snare through bars 5-6, toms through bars 7-10 and hi-hat through bars 11-223.

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 15-20, 27-32 and 39-51, and 19 more places -- 33.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

    15
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
HH |x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
SD |--------r-------|
BD |x---x---x---x---|

3 fills to learn, played 7 times: bars 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 1 more.

It cuts the song into 36 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. The grooves the song is built on -- M -- 2 exercises, about 19 minutes.
2. The grooves the song is built on -- N -- 2 exercises, about 26 minutes.
3. Through Part L -- 6 exercises, about 36 minutes.
4. Bars 1-39 -- 7 exercises, about 30 minutes. Open above.
5. Through the Chorus 3 -- 1 exercise, about 17 minutes.
6. Through the Chorus 3 and Part N -- 2 exercises, about 22 minutes.
7. Through the Chorus 3 and Part N -- 2 exercises, about 21 minutes.
8. Bars 69-196 -- 4 exercises, about 28 minutes.
9. and 4 more sittings after that.