NEW ORDER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Age Of Consent

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-11, 13-21 and 23-25, and 35 more places -- 74.9% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
163 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
211
LENGTH
5:11
DIFFICULTY
77/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 163 BPM
AGE OF CONSENT · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 60 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 77 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

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 106 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 4 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. 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.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 106, 125, 144 and 163 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Age Of Consent use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 163 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 74.9% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-11, 13-21, 23-25 and 27-31, and 34 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 1 time over the song.

Is the beat in Age Of Consent hard?

60 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 77 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 211 BARS ANALYSED