The drum beat in The Only God I See Up Here Is Me

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 32, 34-36 and 38-40, and 8 more places -- 25.2% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

It is played on crash and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 36 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 56 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 173 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 173, 201 and 230 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.