Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Paul Bostaph, the drummer for Slayer and Kerry King, was asked how he created his trademark “relentless tom-and-snare rolls” in an interview with Drumtalk, the video podcast hosted by German drummer and videographer Philipp Koch, as per Blabbermouth. These rolls were initially heard on his 1994 debut Slayer studio album, “Divine Intervention”.
Well, that was a long time ago. But that was also the first album that I did as the new drummer of Slayer. So I put a lot of time into working hard to improve my playing, to be the drummer that Slayer needed, because the drummer that they had [before I joined], Dave Lombardo, is a great drummer. You just don’t come into a band like that — I didn’t; I didn’t wanna come into a band like that, filling in for a drummer like Dave, not trying to be him — nobody will ever be him; he’s his own drummer; he’s a great drummer — but trying to be the best drummer I can be and give the fans what they expect.
I was a fan myself, so I kind of already knew [what the fans would want to hear]. So I go back to when Nicko McBrain replaced Clive Burr[in Iron Maiden]. I was a big Clive Burr fan [and a] big Maiden fan, but when Nicko came in, when you put that needle on the record, which there was a record, you put the needle on the record and you’re, like, ‘Okay, come on, man. Come on. Just don’t let me down.’ And, boom, the intro for ‘Where Eagles Dare’ comes on, you’re, like, ‘Yes!’ So that expectation in myself, in that moment, made me go, ‘Dude, you have to work hard, because if you just try to be the drummer you are, that they accepted to be in the band, it’s not good enough.’
It took a year for us to work on [‘Divine Intervention’] and record it. So I told myself I had one year to improve. At the beginning of that year, I was the same drummer, but at the end of the year — if you saw me at the beginning of the year and you heard me at the end of the year, you’d go, ‘Whoa, what happened?’ So I worked really hard to try to achieve that. The bottom line is the more you practice, the better you’re going to get. Period. If you practice with the band for four hours, or however long that is, but if you show up early and you practice for an hour before the band gets there, you put five hours in of drumming a day.
And on top of that, for thrash metal or for heavy metal, nothing can replace the intensity of playing with your band. So if you practice by yourself all the time, there’s an intensity level to that. But when you go and you play with the band, that becomes way bigger. So nobody’s ever gonna practice after the band is done. You wanna go home. You shouldn’t be going, ‘Well, I can play for two more hours after band practice.’ You should probably have put all your effort into the music, and then it’s time to go home. So the idea is get there early, if you can. Get there early, even if it’s a half hour. Work on the ideas during that you have, [that] you’re playing during your songs.
I would always record rehearsals with Slayer, and I would take the tapes home and I’d listen to them, and I would hear something I was trying to do, and sometimes it would just fall flat on its face, but I would know that there was an idea there that I hadn’t played before that would work with what the guitar riffs were doing. The band didn’t practice on the weekends, so on the weekends, I stayed back and I practiced by myself and worked on all those ideas. And then when Monday came around, when we started practicing again, I was able to nail parts and they became signature parts.
And I worked really hard on that. So some of the stuff that happened on that record was totally improvised — it just happened. I was, like, ‘Whoa.’ Like the end of ‘Dittohead’, the very end roll in ‘Dittohead’, I didn’t practice that. I had no idea what I was gonna do, and it just happened, and I was just, like, ‘Whoa, I want that drum fill. That’s cool.’ And that happened in the recording studio. So some of the stuff in that record was not planned out, and there was other stuff that was planned out. So as far as the long drum fills and stuff like that, part of that has to do with playing with the band and knowing what fits with that band.
Also, before we did that record, I did some touring with them and played their old songs, and some of their current songs from the record before. So I didn’t need to play exactly what the other drummer played, what Dave played. I didn’t have to try to be him, but when you listen to a Slayer song, they have a certain sound, and phrasing is what’s important. So if you phrase something or you put it in a place in a familiar spot that has a familiarity to what they played before, people will feel like it’s the same, but it’s different in some way.
And what the different part about it is, is you — the drummer is different. But the phrasing is kind of close, where you put it in the song or just a particular type of fill. I think some of it was derived from playing with the band and the old material, ’cause that really helped me settle into being the drummer of the band. If we hadn’t done the old stuff and I just would’ve joined the band, it would’ve take me a lot longer to figure it out. But since we’d already toured together, I kind of knew what worked and what didn’t work, and that helped with the new album, with ‘Divine Intervention’.
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