Every Breath You Take Drum Transcription

The Every Breath You Take drum transcription comes with a confession that Stewart Copeland himself has made publicly: what you hear on the recording is not a live drum performance.

It was assembled in pieces, under significant tension, with two members of the band not willing to be in the same room at the same time.

By 1983, The Police were the biggest band in the world and were also coming apart. Sting and Copeland had developed a working relationship that producer Hugh Padgham described as constant warfare.

On this specific track, the battle was over the hi-hat. “Stewart would say, ‘I want to put my drum part on it,’ and Sting would say, ‘I don’t want you to put your drum part on it,'” Padgham recalled in a Sound on Sound interview.

The solution they arrived at was both creative and bizarre. Sting would go skiing in the morning. Copeland would come in and overdub a hi-hat part. Sting would return after lunch, hate it, and Padgham would remove it.

Copeland would come back and ask what happened to his hi-hat. This cycle repeated until they eventually settled on something everyone could tolerate.

The result is one of the most unusual drum recordings in pop history. Copeland has described the process precisely: the kick drum is from an Oberheim drum machine, not a real kick.

The snare is Copeland playing two drums simultaneously, one in each hand, a snare drum and a Tama gong drum, struck together to produce a heavy, cracking backbeat. The hi-hat was overdubbed as a completely separate track.

And crucially, the hi-hat also runs through a 300-millisecond digital delay, which creates a polyrhythm in the final mix that is technically impossible to replicate live.

Copeland has stated that the delay was later taken on tour via a digital delay unit to approximate the sound, but what you hear on the record is an effect, not a played part.

All of this is worth knowing before you read the chart because it shapes how you approach the transcription. The drum sheet represents the composite result of those overdubs, the sound that exists in the recording, not a single performance anyone ever played in real time.

At its core, the groove is straightforward and clean. The kick sits on 1 and 3. The snare backbeat lands on 2 and 4 with authority. The hi-hat runs 8th notes throughout.

Getting those three elements locked in together at the right feel is the primary task. Our drum notation guide will help you read the chart clearly before you put it together at tempo.

The chorus features a shift where Copeland plays the bass drum almost continuously, which gives the section more forward momentum than the restrained verse groove.

For the swooshes leading into the chorus, he overdubbed the gong drum with a cymbal swell played with soft mallets, a textural detail that doesn’t show up as a standard notated element but is part of what makes the production feel as cinematic as it does.

In the music video, which MTV played to exhaustion throughout 1983, Copeland can be seen playing 8th notes on his floor tom with kick drum accents rather than the hi-hat-led groove on the record.

It’s a small detail that reveals how much creative problem-solving went into translating this song from studio to stage. The full history of the Synchronicity sessions and the band is documented through the official Police archive at thepolice.com.

For a similar exercise in building a groove from minimal elements where the feel matters more than the complexity, the Don’t Stop Believin’ drum transcription is a natural companion.

Steve Smith and Stewart Copeland are completely different players in completely different styles, but both understood that the right amount of restraint in a big pop song leaves more room for the song to breathe than any technically impressive drum part would.

If the recording story here has you curious about how drum sounds are constructed in the studio more broadly, our guide on how to record drums covers the fundamentals of what decisions go into capturing a drum kit, including how separate overdubs and layering work in practice.

This chart lives in our free drum transcriptions library alongside 160+ others.

Difficulty: Beginner
Tempo: ~113 BPM
Time Signature: 4/4
Key Technique: Composite overdub recording approach, clean 8th-note hi-hat pulse, doubled snare and gong drum backbeat, bass drum variation between verse and chorus, malletted cymbal swells into chorus.