The drum beat in The Ballad Of Mona Lisa

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 33-38, 61-66 and 93-98, and 1 more place -- 25.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 50 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 51 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 81 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 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, 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 81, 96, 110 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.