The drum beat in Sweet Child of Mine

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-34, 37-38 and 65-66, and 12 more places -- 34.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 49 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 94 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, 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 94, 109 and 125 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.