The drum beat in The Dying Breath of a Sacred Stag

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 33-54, 79 and 81-87, and 10 more places -- 29.5% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 72 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

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 130 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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 130, 151 and 173 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.