The drum beat in Soft Spine

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 17-19, 21-23 and 37-39, and 1 more place -- 18.5% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

It is played on crash, snare, kick and hi-hat foot, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 60 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 most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 66 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, 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 66, 78, 90 and 102 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.