10 Hardest Drumming Songs In Hard Rock

Anyone looking to get acclimatized with the world of prog rock should get used to performances that are a bit lengthy. I mean, even the more popular bands of the genre like Pink Floyd did have to test their listeners' patience from time to time, with songs spanning over 20 minutes at the most extravagant. Compared to the elders of prog though, Metropolis Pt. 2 makes something like Echoes feel like a walk in the park.

Running across an entire albums worth of material, Mike Portnoy seems to have taken nearly every drumming lesson he's heard in his life and put it into this piece, going from slow mellow passages to the most technically precise moments in rock music. While even the most perfect records of all time have a bit of looseness to the playing, Portnoy's hits feel so perfectly in tune at every turn, almost like he's laying each hit perfectly in time to the very last nanosecond.

The centerpiece of it all though has to be the Dance of Eternity, where Portnoy manages to play a prog rock style beat with the same ferocity as someone like John Bonham over 6 minutes of musical mayhem. While many people like to study the great musicians of rock, this is the equivalent of taking your drummer to grad school to make his thesis.