The drum beat in Sickman

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 19-21, 24-25 and 27, and 18 more places -- 33.6% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 49 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 83 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 82 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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, ride 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 82, 95 and 109 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.