METALLICA · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Trapped Under Ice

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 6-20, 22-24 and 26-28, and 10 more places -- 56.3% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
136 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
162
LENGTH
4:46
DIFFICULTY
88/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 136 BPM
TRAPPED UNDER ICE · BARS 8-9

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 78 out of 100 -- demanding -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 88 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 75 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 75, 90, 105, 121 and 136 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 Trapped Under Ice use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 136 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 56.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 6-20, 22-24, 26-28 and 30-35, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 10 times over the song.

Is the beat in Trapped Under Ice hard?

78 out of 100 on its own -- demanding. The song as a whole is 88 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 162 BARS ANALYSED