The drum beat in When A Man Loves A Woman

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 6-16 and 18-20 -- 23% 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 48 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how much of it falls off the beat.

The whole song is 81 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 41 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 41, 48 and 55 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.