METALLICA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in ManUNkind

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 111-126, 145-161 and 163, and 11 more places -- 25.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
122 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
280
LENGTH
8:02
DIFFICULTY
46/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 122 BPM
MANUNKIND · BARS 111-112

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 36 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 46 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 92 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 92, 107 and 122 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 ManUNkind use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 122 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 25.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 111-126, 145-161, 163 and 165, and 10 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 28 times over the song.

Is the beat in ManUNkind hard?

36 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 46 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 280 BARS ANALYSED