You write a few riffs, program some grooves you like, and then get stuck: how do these parts become a song? Usually it is because there was no picture of the song before the parts. A structure is not a box to squeeze into. It is a map of what has worked, so you can decide on purpose where to follow it and where to break it.
To draw that map, I broke down 100 songs by 20 metal bands, five songs each, part by part, and counted the bars. The full sheet is free to open: Metal band song structures (Google Sheet). This post is what the numbers say, and how to use them when you write.
In this post:
- The 100 songs
- Five songs, bar by bar
- How long each part is
- When the chorus arrives
- Breakdowns, solos and breaks
- What the drums do in each part
- A skeleton to start from
- Questions
The 100 songs
The bands: Slipknot, Slayer, Gojira, Cannibal Corpse, Anthrax, Architects, Bring Me the Horizon, Volumes, Arch Enemy, Decapitated, I Prevail, Disturbed, Amon Amarth, Suicide Silence, Machine Head, Mastodon, Erra, Lamb of God, Avenged Sevenfold and Bullet for My Valentine. That is thrash, death metal, metalcore, deathcore, groove, prog and heavy metal in one sample.
Each song is split into its parts in order: intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, solo, build-up, outro, and breaks, the short stops, fills and pickups between parts. Each part has its length in bars. Soft and heavy versions of a part are kept apart (a soft verse, then a heavy verse), which is how a lot of these songs are built.
Five songs, bar by bar
Here are five of them drawn to the same scale. Each block is one part, and its width is its length in bars.
- Bring Me the Horizon, “Drown” has no solo and no breakdown. It keeps coming back to the chorus, and each return is set up by a short break and a build-up.
- Erra, “Vanish Canvas” opens with 32 bars of verse (soft, heavy, soft), has one breakdown after the second chorus, then brings the intro back and ends on a chorus.
- Lamb of God, “Walk with Me in Hell” uses short verse and chorus parts of 2 to 7 bars, split by one-bar breaks, then goes straight from a 24-bar breakdown into a 16-bar solo and a 24-bar final chorus.
- Avenged Sevenfold, “Hail to the King” takes 32 bars of intro, does two rounds of verse and chorus, then a 24-bar solo and an instrumental part before the last chorus. No breakdown.
- Cannibal Corpse, “Inhumane Harvest” has a blast part after the first verses and another to end on, and 32 bars of breakdown in the middle, then a solo and another breakdown after it.
Five very different songs, and they are all between 138 and 147 bars long.
How long each part is
Across all 1,692 parts in the sheet, one length wins by a distance: 8 bars. A third of all parts are exactly 8 bars long. Add 16-bar and 4-bar parts, and you have two thirds of everything.
Joined up (a soft verse followed by a heavy verse counts as one verse), the middle lengths are:
| Part | Typical length | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 8 bars | 96 of the 100 songs open with one |
| Verse | 15 to 16 bars | About a third mix soft and heavy parts |
| Chorus | 16 bars | The most repeated part: three times in 54 songs |
| Breakdown | 14 bars | In 69 songs; single parts are mostly 8 or 16 bars |
| Solo | 16 bars | In 54 songs |
| Outro | 8 bars | 31 songs end on one; 49 end on a chorus |
A whole song is 141 bars in the middle of the sample, from 64 bars (Suicide Silence, “Unanswered”) to 266 (Slayer, “Angel of Death”). In 4/4, 141 bars is about 4 minutes 42 seconds at 120 BPM, or 3 minutes 32 seconds at 160 BPM.
Why it matters when you program drums: if your parts are 8 bars long, your fills go in bar 8, your crashes on bar 1, and a 4-bar groove from a MIDI pack loops exactly twice. Work in 4s and 8s and everything lines up.
When the chorus arrives
96 of the 100 songs open with an intro. The first chorus starts at bar 35 in the middle of the sample, and half of the songs get there between bar 24 and bar 48.
The single most common opening is intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus: 34 of the 100 songs start that way. Another 16 go back to the intro riff after the first chorus before the second verse.
- Choruses: 54 songs have three chorus sections, and 90 have between two and four.
- Verses: two or three in 75 songs.
- Pre-choruses are rare here: only 3 of the 100 songs have one. In this sample, the verse usually goes straight into the chorus.
- Endings: 49 songs end on a chorus, and 31 on an outro.
Breakdowns, solos and breaks
69 of the 100 songs have a breakdown. The first one starts, in the middle of the sample, 59% of the way through the song, and half of them start between 49% and 66%. In 60 of those 69 songs it comes after the second chorus, the slot where older songs put a bridge. More on writing them in What is a metal breakdown?
54 songs have a solo, and the split by band is sharp. All five songs by Slayer, Cannibal Corpse, Arch Enemy, Mastodon and Avenged Sevenfold have one; none of the five by Architects, Bring Me the Horizon, Volumes or Disturbed does.
Breaks are everywhere: 204 of them, and most are one or two bars long. They are the stop before the chorus, the fill into the breakdown, the bar of silence before the last riff. In a drum part, these are the bars that make a song sound arranged rather than looped.
What the drums do in each part
The sheet counts bars, not drum parts, but the parts it names come with habits most metal drummers share:
| Part | What the drums often do |
|---|---|
| Intro | The main groove after a fill or a big first hit, or a simpler beat under the riff |
| Verse | Tighter: closed hi-hat or ride, a kick pattern that follows the riff, room for the vocal |
| Chorus | Bigger: crash or open hi-hat, a strong backbeat, more cymbal |
| Break | A stop, a single hit, or a fill into the next part |
| Build-up | Snare or toms growing louder and busier into the next part |
| Breakdown | Half-time feel, china, the kick locked to the guitar chugs |
| Solo | A steady groove, often the verse or chorus beat, so the guitar has the space |
| Outro | The intro groove again, or a final hit |
Metalcore Essentials is laid out in exactly these parts: 8 soft verse grooves, 18 heavy verse grooves, 18 chorus grooves, 12 breakdowns, 29 heavy grooves and 17 rolls for the breaks between them. For the ends of a song, Slamming Metal Intros and Outros has 87 files and Melodic Metal Intros and Interludes has 102.
A skeleton to start from
Put the most common order together with the typical lengths and you get a skeleton. It is not a rule; it is something to react to.
- Set the tempo, then mark the skeleton out in your DAW as empty regions or markers: intro 8, verse 16, chorus 16, a 2-bar break, verse 16, chorus 16, breakdown 16, solo 16, chorus 16, outro 8.
- Write the chorus first. It is the part everything else leads to, and it is repeated the most.
- Pick a reference song you love, find it in the sheet (or map it yourself), and compare. Where it is longer or shorter than the skeleton, ask why.
- Put a drum groove on each part, then write the breaks: a fill, a stop or a crash at every change.
- Cut anything that repeats without adding something. Just over half of the songs in the sheet (56) are under 150 bars.
If you would rather start from drums, the free drum programming course shows how to write a beat to a guitar part, and getting started shows how to drop MIDI grooves into your DAW.
Questions
What is the most common metal song structure?
Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, then a breakdown or a solo, and a final chorus. In the 100-song sheet, 34 songs open with exactly intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus.
How many bars is a verse in a metal song?
About 16 bars in total, in the middle of the sample (15). Across all parts of every song, 8 bars is by far the most common length.
How long is a metal song in bars?
The middle of the 100 songs is 141 bars. The shortest is 64 bars and the longest 266.
Do metal songs have a pre-chorus?
Rarely, in this sample: 3 of the 100 songs have one. Most go straight from verse to chorus.
Where does the breakdown go?
Usually after the second chorus: in 60 of the 69 songs in the sheet that have one. The first breakdown starts about 59% of the way into the song.
Metalcore Essentials has a folder for each part of the song: verses, choruses, breakdowns and rolls, 102 files played by a drummer.
Verses, choruses and breakdowns for every part of the song
Metalcore Essentials - MIDI Pack · $18. Drum MIDI played by a real drummer, for any DAW and any drum VST.
See it and hear the demosAll the packs
