The drum beat in The Shortest Straw

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 36, 38-39 and 43-44, and 17 more places -- 18.2% 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 hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 75 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 89 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 77 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 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, 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 77, 93, 109, 124 and 140 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.