I’ve listened to and watched a lot of instructional videos and interviews with drummers over the years. One song that always comes up, with respect to its drum part, is Steve Gadd’s groove in the verses of the Paul Simon song “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”. I can’t think of another single song in rock music with a more famous drum track, amongst drummers. Don’t believe me? Type ‘gadd 50 ways’ into google, and you get over 12,000 hits. The drum part completely makes the song, and it would be pretty boring otherwise. Even the verses are a lot better than the chorus of the song, which isn’t common. Paul Simon helped this song out a lot by leaving tons of space in the guitar part for the drums to be heard.

The thing is, it sounds simple, but it is pretty bizarre to play. Over the last decade, every six months or so, I play it for a while, then realize that I’m playing some part of it wrong. I’ll go back and listen to it again, correct one thing, I’ll think I’m doing it right, then repeat. And I still don’t play it perfectly now. Certainly, after six months, I’ll have to review for 10 minutes to come close.

When I was first learning drums, this was an example that stood out as having a cool marching band groove in rock music, which isn’t that common. My first obstacle was the double stroke roll. Essentially this is where you hit twice in a row with your right hand followed by twice in a row with your left hand. This is used all over marching band stuff. It’s hard to make this to not sound sloppy. Here’s an example of the (former) drummer from Primus and the new drummer for Guns N’ Roses, practicing his double stroke roll.

I got the basics of that down pretty quickly, but I’m still always practicing to make it more precise, fast, and to make sure the second hit of the roll is just as precise and dynamic as the first hit, which is a challenge.

The second obstacle was the two bar phrasing of the drum part. The two bars that alternate in the verses sound the same, but they are completely different. Notice that in the verses, in the first bar, the double stroke roll is placed on the ‘4’, whereas on the second bar, it always goes on the ‘and after 4’. The placement of that traditionally would almost always go on the ‘and’.

The next obstacle was that when the double strong roll was on the ‘and after 4’, it would last for an entire eighth note (pretty common because that is two hits with the right hand, followed by two on the left). But, on the double stroke roll on the four, it only lasts for a sixteenth note (two quick 32nd hits with the right hand only, followed by only one with the left). It just feels weird to do that roll only on the ‘on’ beat. Still.

Next came the low toms. It gets one hit every two bars, on the four before the roll on the ‘and after four’. Weird stuff.

Then came the high hat part. Ah, the high hat part. I played this wrong forever. The weird part here is that the left hand changes mid-way through the bar from playing the second of the sixteenth notes, to the eighth notes. For a long time, I would play those two eighth notes transposed to the left by a sixteenth note. That is certainly the more natural way to place it as it follows the ‘right-left-right-left’ pattern of hits with sixteenth notes as your hands move. And if you do it wrong, it sounds horrible. And that’s how I did it.

Then, I realized that those two high hat hits with the left hand were on ‘2’ and the ‘and after 2’. I had been playing them on the ‘and after 2’ and ‘3’. A side note is this is the only mistake I’ve ever made on this song which didn’t make the song sound horribly worse.

Next comes the bass drum. I realized just this year that I was playing this part wrong. There is always a bass hit on the ‘1’ and the ‘3’. But every two bars, there is a second bass hit on the sixteenth note before ‘3’. It makes it sound way better to hit that. Otherwise, not having any hits there sounds kind of empty.

Right. So am I doing it right now? Nope. I haven’t worked in those two high hat kicks with the foot. I’ll get it someday.

Here’s Steve Gadd himself breaking down the part.