Scott Travis | Judas Priest's double-kick engine

Some drummers get a career-defining moment halfway through their career. Scott Travis got his in the first eight seconds of his first album with the band.

The intro to “Painkiller” is a drum fill, not a riff — a double-kick avalanche that announces both a song and a new drummer, and it is still the thing people ask him to play.

Thirty-seven years later he is still in the chair. Here is how an American drummer from Virginia ended up powering Britain’s most British metal band.

Who is Scott Travis?

Scott Travis was born on 6 September 1961 in Norfolk, Virginia.

He moved to Los Angeles in the eighties and joined Racer X, the technical hard-rock band built around guitarist Paul Gilbert — a group whose whole reason for existing was to play faster and cleaner than anyone else.

That is a useful apprenticeship. Racer X material demands precision at speed, without the weight that metal usually leans on.

Joining Judas Priest

In 1989, Judas Priest needed a drummer. Travis got the job — and became the first American ever to join the band.

His debut was Painkiller (1990), and it changed what Priest sounded like. The band had always been fast; with Travis they became relentless. That record is the bridge between traditional heavy metal and the speed and thrash bands that followed.

He has been there ever since: Jugulator, Demolition, Angel of Retribution, Nostradamus, Redeemer of Souls, Firepower (2018) and Invincible Shield (2024). He kept playing with Racer X on the side throughout.

What Scott Travis actually does

Stamina. This is his defining quality, and it is genuinely rare. Priest sets run to two hours of fast double kick, and the last song is as clean as the first.

Even feet. His double bass is balanced — left and right sound identical, which is what makes fast runs read as one continuous line rather than a limp.

He plays for the song, at speed. “Painkiller” is a showcase; most of the catalogue is not. On “Breaking the Law” or “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” he plays a plain rock beat and gets out of the way.

He is loud without being sloppy. A big, open, hard-hitting sound with the articulation intact. Not a common combination in metal.

He drives the band. Priest are a two-guitar band with a singer who needs room. Travis sits on the front of the beat and pushes them all forward.

Drumeo’s panel gave him the Louie Bellson Award for Double Bass in 2025, for exactly this: power and stamina, applied over thirty-five years.

The Painkiller intro

Worth its own section, because everyone tries it.

It is a bar of straight sixteenths on the double kick with tom accents over the top, at roughly 200bpm, played cold with no lead-in. There is nowhere to hide.

The thing that catches people out is not the speed — it is that it starts from silence. No count-in, no groove to settle into. You have to arrive already at tempo, which is a completely different skill from getting up to tempo.

Scott Travis’s drum kit

His shells have moved around; his cymbals have not.

• Drums. Tama until around 2008, then a switch mid-tour — a Pearl kit on the first leg of the Nostradamus tour, then DW on the second. He has been a DW player since.
• Big kicks. He toured on enormous 23” bass drums for years before deciding to come back down to 22” — a rare example of a metal drummer going smaller.
• The configuration. Two kicks, 8”/10”/12”/14” rack toms and 16”x16” and 18”x16” floor toms, with a 14”x6.5” snare. Beier have also built him snares.
• Cymbals — Paiste, since May 1987. One of the longer unbroken cymbal endorsements in metal.
• Pedals — DW 9000 double.

Every era, with buy links, is on Scott Travis’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

Two kicks and a wall of toms are not the point. Stamina is, and stamina is free.

Practise slower than you think. Even, relaxed sixteenths at 120bpm for five minutes will teach your legs more than thirty seconds at 200 ever will. The goal is to be able to hold a tempo without your calves seizing, and that is built at moderate speed.

Balance the feet. Play single strokes between them and listen for the weak one. Everybody has one.

If you want the gear side: a good direct-drive or chain double pedal is the one purchase that genuinely helps here — our direct-drive pedal guide explains what the difference actually feels like, and the Gear Guru will spec the rest of the kit to a budget.

Where to start listening

• “Painkiller” (1990). The intro, then the rest of it, which is just as hard.
• “Judas Rising” (2005). The comeback record, and he sounds delighted.
• “Firepower” (2018). Fifty-seven years old and playing like the debut.
• Racer X — “Technical Difficulties” (1999). The other Scott Travis: lighter, faster, more exposed.
• “Invincible Shield” (2024). Still no drop-off.

Final thoughts

Travis has now been Judas Priest’s drummer for longer than all his predecessors combined, and he arrived with the single most famous drum introduction in British metal.

He is not a flashy player away from that intro, and he has never needed to be. What he offers is a band-sized engine that does not slow down, does not get untidy and does not get tired — for two hours, several hundred nights a year, for thirty-seven years.

That is its own kind of virtuosity, and the Bellson award is the right one for it.

See Scott Travis’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Tomas Haake — the other Bellson honouree, and a completely different answer to the same question.