METALLICA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in And Justice Medley

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 91-93, 99-100 and 133, and 52 more places -- 22% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
200 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
368
LENGTH
6:53
DIFFICULTY
67/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 200 BPM
AND JUSTICE MEDLEY · BAR 91

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 57 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 67 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 130 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 130, 153, 177 and 200 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 And Justice Medley use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 200 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 22% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 91-93, 99-100, 133 and 135-137, and 51 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 26 times over the song.

Is the beat in And Justice Medley hard?

57 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 67 out of 100: demanding, mostly on the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 368 BARS ANALYSED