DRUM SONGS

Hard drum songs

Thousands of charts, 25 to 300 BPM, averaging 150. Each one is read from a real score: play it along to the record, take it down to any tempo, or work through the course underneath it.

MOST PLAYED

TEMPO
25-300 BPM
AVERAGE
150 BPM
MOSTLY
ADVANCED

MOST PLAYED FIRST

The whole shelf, where you can narrow it further or sort it easiest first.

ABOUT HARD DRUM SONGS

These are the parts that were written to be difficult, or that became difficult because of what the rest of the band was doing. Fast doubles, meters that move, limbs that never line up, parts where nothing repeats for forty bars. Each chart is read from a real score, so what is on the page is what was played, not a simplification of it.

Everything ranked on this shelf sits in the advanced tier of the source catalogue's own difficulty list. Hundreds of hours of playing at the tempos written, all told.

A good place to start is "KiLLKiSS" at 25 BPM, the slowest of the hardest songs on this shelf, or "song revamped" at 15 bars, the shortest. Every chart here downloads as sheet music, tab, MIDI and MusicXML if you would rather read it away from the screen.

QUESTIONS

What makes a drum part hard?

Nine things, and speed is only one of them: how many notes a second it asks for, how fine the subdivision is, how many limbs land together, how much falls off the beat, how often it moves around the kit, the independence between hands and feet, the speed of the hand keeping time, the ghost notes under the accents, and how little of it repeats. Every chart here is scored on all nine, and the page tells you which one is doing the damage.

Should I learn a hard song before I can play an easy one?

You can, if you take it apart. The practice course under most of these songs does exactly that: it finds the few bars that are actually different, puts each one on its own at a quarter of the tempo, and climbs. Learning one hard bar properly teaches more than learning ten easy songs badly.

How fast are hard drum songs?

From 25 to 300 BPM, averaging 150. That number is where the record sits, not where you have to play it: every chart here runs at any tempo from a quarter of the written one upwards, with the recording following where it can.

What is the slowest and the fastest of them?

"KiLLKiSS" by Ave Mujica at 25 BPM is the slowest, and "Heaven's Damnation" by Dissection at 300 BPM is the quickest. Neither number is a wall: every chart here plays at any tempo from a quarter of the written one upwards, so the fast ones are learnable at the speed of the slow ones.

Which one is quickest to learn?

"song revamped" by jose is the shortest part on this shelf at 15 bars. Short is not the same as easy, but a short part is one you can get all the way through in a sitting, and playing something end to end teaches more than looping the first eight bars of something longer.

BY HOW HARD IT IS

Easy drum songs