The drum beat in The Court Of The Crimson King

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 3-4, 7 and 19-20, and 15 more places -- 23.3% 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, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 63 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 70 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 44 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, 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 44, 52, 60 and 68 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.