The blast beat is extreme metal's defining gesture: snare and kick alternating at very high speed, with the hand also marking time on a cymbal. The "traditional" blast — the version played by Lombardo, Scott Columbus, and the early-90s death-metal pioneers — has the snare and kick alternating in 8th or 16th notes, hands and feet hitting opposite sides of every subdivision. The bar becomes a continuous wall of percussion, with the snare and kick taking turns half a subdivision apart.
There are a half-dozen named blast variants — bomb blast, hammer blast, gravity blast, economy blast — but they all share the same underlying engine: alternation at speed. This lesson installs the foundation. Tempo matters less than evenness; a clean blast at ♩=110 sounds far better than a sloppy one at ♩=180.
Mechanics Warning
Blast beats are physically demanding. They will expose any tension in your wrists, ankles, or shoulders within seconds. Keep the strokes small and low to the drum (1–2 inches), use heel-up technique on the kick, and stop the moment your forearm or calf starts to cramp. Two clean 15-second blasts are worth more than one minute of struggling.
Exercises
Hat 8ths in the right hand. Snare on every down-8th (1, 2, 3, 4); kick on every up-8th (the &'s). Hand and snare hit together on the downbeats; hand and kick hit together on the off-beats. This is the slowest possible blast — the alternation pattern is identical to a faster blast, just stretched out. If you can't make this clean at ♩=100, you can't make a fast blast clean at any tempo.
16th-note blast. Hat 16ths, snare on the on-16ths (the e's and downbeats — actually positions 1 and 3 of each beat), kick on the off-16ths (the e and a positions). Hand and snare together on positions 1+3; hand and kick together on positions 2+4 of each beat. At ♩=140 the 16ths are 16/sec — very fast. Keep strokes small.
Same blast pattern with the hand on the china instead of the hi-hat. The china's trash-cymbal sustain bleeds into every stroke and gives the blast its trademark wash — the sound of late-90s Cannibal Corpse, Behemoth, modern death metal. The kick must still be audible underneath; if the china is drowning it out, drop the cymbal volume by playing closer to the bell.
Three beats of standard alternating blast, then beat 4 turns into pure 16th-note kicks (no rests) — the bar closes with all kicks underneath the hand-snare alternation. This is the canonical Slayer / Cannibal Corpse move: the bar that builds to a 16th-kick wall on beat 4 before resetting. Keep the wrists relaxed; the bar 4 surge is where most blasts collapse.