SLAYER · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Show No Mercy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 5-7, 9-13 and 31-37, and 8 more places -- 36.2% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
185 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
130
LENGTH
2:49
DIFFICULTY
97/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 185 BPM
SHOW NO MERCY · BAR 5

It is played on hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 87 out of 100 -- hard -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 97 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 102 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 5 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  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 102, 123, 143, 164 and 185 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 Show No Mercy use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 185 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 36.2% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 5-7, 9-13, 31-37 and 55-61, and 7 more places. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 4 times over the song.

Is the beat in Show No Mercy hard?

87 out of 100 on its own -- hard. The song as a whole is 97 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 130 BARS ANALYSED