DRUM SONGS

Hard metal drum songs

Hundreds of charts, 30 to 300 BPM, averaging 149. 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: 30-300 BPM
AVERAGE: 149 BPM
MOSTLY: ADVANCED

MOST PLAYED FIRST

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

ABOUT HARD METAL DRUM SONGS

The metal parts at the top of the difficulty list: sustained double kick, blast beats, meters that move under you, and parts that do not repeat for a page at a time. These are not songs to learn in a week. Every one of them has a course underneath it that takes the bars apart and puts them back at tempo.

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

A good place to start is "Phantom Lord" at 30 BPM, the slowest of the hardest metal songs on this shelf, or "Unhallowed" at 32 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 is the hardest metal song to play on drums?

It depends which kind of hard. This shelf is sorted by a score built from nine measurements of the part itself -- note rate, subdivision, limb load, syncopation, movement around the kit, independence, the speed of the timekeeping hand, dynamics, and how little of it repeats -- and each chart tells you which of the nine is doing the damage on that particular song.

How long does it take to learn a song like this?

Weeks, and the way through is not repetition of the whole thing. The course on each of these breaks the part into the few bars that are genuinely different, puts each one on its own at a quarter of the tempo, and climbs back up -- typically a dozen sittings rather than one long one.

How fast are hard metal drum songs?

From 30 to 300 BPM, averaging 149. 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?

"Phantom Lord" by Metallica at 30 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?

"Unhallowed" by The Black Dahlia Murder is the shortest part on this shelf at 32 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.

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