The drum beat in Rockstar

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 5-12, 31-36 and 55-59 -- 33.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 61 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 52 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
3. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
4. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 52, 61, 71 and 80 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.