METALLICA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Stone Cold Crazy

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-4, 6 and 23-31, and 3 more places -- 18.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
250 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
142
LENGTH
2:17
DIFFICULTY
64/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 250 BPM
STONE COLD CRAZY · BAR 2

It is played on the hi-hat, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 2 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 64 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 188 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. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 188, 219 and 250 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 Stone Cold Crazy use?

A one-bar groove on hi-hat, in 4/4 at 250 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 18.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-4, 6, 23-31 and 33, and 2 more places. The time is kept on the hi-hat to start with, and it changes 19 times over the song.

Is the beat in Stone Cold Crazy hard?

2 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 64 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 · 142 BARS ANALYSED