10 Hardest Drumming Songs In Hard Rock

3. Lateralus - Tool

Most drummers don't really need to pay attention to shifting the time around every time they step behind the kit. Since most of the greatest rock songs in the world are in 4/4, it's not that hard to pick up on the steady tempo of a song and lock in with it for 3 minutes at the most. We're in Tool land for this entry though, where absolutely nothing can be considered normal.

On a purely technical level, this performance almost sounds like it's being played in code, with Danny Carey carefully choosing each precise moment to strike his kit. That's because...well...it practically is being written in code. Centered around the concept of the Fibonacci sequence, Lateralus was built around an ever changing time signature, as beats are added and subtracted in succession every time the meter changes. This is even reflected in Maynard James Keenan's vocals, as each syllable dictates the next number in the cycle.

Yeah, so now if you thought that just laying into a groove was hard enough, now you have to worry about actually doing math while you're trying to make everything sound seamless from start to finish. For rock and roll, something like this just shouldn't work, and yet it makes all the sense in the world once you have Carey at the helm.

 
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