The drum beat in Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-24, 41-60 and 85-104 -- 56.6% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

It is played on floor tom, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 12 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how many limbs land on the same note.

The whole song is 27 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 93 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 93, 109 and 124 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.