The drum beat in Say Say Say (feat. Michael Jackson)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-17, 30-37 and 46-52, and 2 more places -- 60.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

It is played on hi-hat, snare, floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 51 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 68 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 75 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. 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 75, 89, 102 and 116 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.