Stab Me In The Back · X Japan

189 bars at 200 BPM -- fast, and 3:47 of it without a break -- on crash, hi-hat, snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom and kick.

86 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

TEMPO

200 BPM

TIME

4/4

BARS

189

LENGTH

3:47

DIFFICULTY

86/100

silence through bars 1-8, hi-hat through bars 9-12, toms through bars 13-16, hi-hat through bars 17-20, toms through bars 21-28 and hi-hat through bars 29-48, and 10 more changes after that.

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 65, 69 and 87, and 19 more places -- 26.3% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

    103
    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
HH |o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-|
SD |--x---x---x---x-|
BD |x----x--x--x-x--|

17 fills to learn, played 44 times: bars 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 24 and 38 more.

It cuts the song into 50 exercises -- the grooves, the fills, and the joins between sections, which is where players actually come off -- and puts them in the order a teacher would. Each one opens on a reduction you can already play and adds the notes back a rung at a time, with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

1. The grooves the song is built on -- S -- 3 exercises, about 28 minutes.
2. The grooves the song is built on -- D -- 1 exercise, about 20 minutes.
3. The grooves the song is built on -- O -- 6 exercises, about 28 minutes.
4. Through Part A and Part D -- 3 exercises, about 29 minutes.
5. Through Part D and Part E -- 6 exercises, about 24 minutes.
6. Through Part J -- 4 exercises, about 31 minutes.
7. Through Part E and Part J -- 6 exercises, about 27 minutes. Open above.
8. Bars 29-57 -- 7 exercises, about 28 minutes.
9. and 7 more sittings after that.