SLAYER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Blood Red

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 11-14, 27 and 29, and 14 more places -- 29.8% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
135 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
94
LENGTH
2:47
DIFFICULTY
77/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 135 BPM
BLOOD RED · BAR 11

It is played on crash, ride, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 43 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

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 101 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 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, ride 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 101, 118 and 135 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 Blood Red use?

A one-bar groove on crash, ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 135 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 29.8% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 11-14, 27, 29 and 31, and 13 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Blood Red hard?

43 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. 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 · 94 BARS ANALYSED