The drum beat in The First Time

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 1-5, 29-30 and 41-45, and 5 more places -- 30.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash, snare, mid tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 21 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 38 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 97 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, 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 97, 113 and 129 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.