The drum beat in Radio Ga Ga

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5, and 60 more places -- 45.3% 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 55 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 67 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 73 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 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, hi-hat 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 73, 87, 100 and 113 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.