The drum beat in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 27-30, 58-61 and 83-84, and 5 more places -- 21.8% 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, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 40 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 63 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 95 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 95, 111 and 127 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.