The drum beat in To Die Is At Hand

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 16-18, 20-22 and 33-35, and 1 more place -- 22.2% 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 crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 86 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 73 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

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 115 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, ride pulled back to quarter notes. 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 115, 138, 162, 185 and 209 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.