The drum beat in The Crossing

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-16, 18-24 and 26-28, and 40 more places -- 29.7% 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 sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 35 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 46 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 126 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 126, 147 and 168 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.