Pull the Plug Death Metal Groove — Gene Hoglan (Death) Drum Lick | MetalForge
Learn the Pull the Plug Death Metal Groove drum lick by Gene Hoglan of Death. From Pull the Plug (Leprosy (1988)). Pull the Plug from Death's Leprosy album (1988) is one of the foundational death metal drum performa...
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1. Gene Hoglan's Signature Licks — Pull the Plug from Death's Leprosy album (1988) is one of the foundational death metal drum performances in the genre's history, featuring a combination of driving groove and precisely timed fill work that established the template for early death metal rhythmic vocabulary. The track operates at a mid-to-high tempo that sits between the methodical plod of doom-influenced death metal and the full blast of the genre's most extreme material, creating a rhythmic space where groove and aggression coexist in a tension that gives the song its relentless forward momentum. Gene Hoglan, who joined Death in 1993 beginning with Individual Thought Patterns, brought this early Leprosy-era material into his deep repertoire through his work with Chuck Schuldiner and his extensive engagement with the Death catalog across live performances, teaching situations, and tribute contexts. The Leprosy-era Death groove vocabulary that Pull the Plug exemplifies — driven, purposeful double-bass patterns beneath a snare that cracks on every backbeat with authority, fills that arrive at structurally significant moments and resolve cleanly without disrupting momentum — became central to Hoglan's understanding of early death metal and directly informed the way he approached his own Death recordings from ITP onward. The groove on Pull the Plug has a specific weight that comes from how the kick drum locks to the guitar riff's rhythmic contour rather than simply providing a generic underlying pulse. This riff-lock technique — where the kick accents amplify specific guitar hits rather than playing against or over them — is a defining characteristic of the Leprosy-era sound and one of the elements that Hoglan refined and developed further in his own Death tenure. The fill work on the track is equally instructive: fills appear at the end of phrases and at structural transitions, they are compact, they resolve on the correct beat without any lag or rush, and their rhythmic content connects logically to the groove material on either side of them. This is fundamentally good compositional drumming — fills as punctuation within a larger rhythmic statement rather than as displays disconnected from the song's architecture. For drummers studying the Pull the Plug groove and fill combination, the most important practice approach is to learn the groove thoroughly in isolation first, building the riff-lock kick pattern against the guitar at accurate tempo before any fill work is attempted. The fills should be learned as individual phrases with specific start and end points, practiced until they arrive and depart cleanly at tempo, and only then inserted into their structural positions within the full arrangement. Death's Leprosy-era material remains some of the most instructive drum pedagogy in the extreme metal tradition.2. Gene Hoglan Profile — Build the riff-lock kick pattern by practicing the groove against the guitar track in isolation before adding fills Learn each fill as an individual phrase with defined start and end points before inserting it into the arrangement Ensure fills resolve cleanly on the correct beat without any lag or anticipation — the arrival must be exact Maintain the driving snare authority on every backbeat throughout the groove, including through high-density kick passages Practice the transitions between groove and fill until they feel seamless rather than spliced together
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