The drum beat in The March Enemy

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 96-100, 102-104 and 106, and 3 more places -- 15.1% 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, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 46 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 49 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, 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 49, 57 and 65 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.