The drum beat in Pretenders

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9, 11 and 13, and 26 more places -- 39.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 49 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 63 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 143 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

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, and nothing else. 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 143, 166 and 190 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.