EDDIE AND THE CURISERS · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Tender Years

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 10-48, 50-57 and 59-65, and 2 more places -- 65.4% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and the song is very nearly finished.

TEMPO
100 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
106
LENGTH
4:14
DIFFICULTY
39/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 100 BPM
TENDER YEARS · BAR 10

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 39 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

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 75 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  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 75, 88 and 100 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 Tender Years use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 100 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 65.4% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 10-48, 50-57, 59-65 and 67-72, and 1 more place. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Tender Years hard?

27 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 39 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 106 BARS ANALYSED