Title: Sleeping Giant
Artist: Mastodon
Album: Blood Mountain
Bassist: Troy Sanders
Difficulty: Advanced
Tuning: Drop C Tuning
Key: C Minor
Tempo: 140
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Bass Diary Entry
After falling in love with Mastodon through Leviathan, I somehow completely missed the release of Blood Mountain when it first came out. It wasn’t until the following year, in 2007, after seeing the band support Metallica at Wembley Stadium and them playing several songs from that album, that I went away and listened to it in full — and it absolutely blew me away.
Sleeping Giant quickly became one of my favourites from the record. That intro is just so powerful and mysterious, slowly building tension before everything kicks in properly. It has that classic Mastodon feeling of being both massive and slightly unsettling at the same time, which is something they do incredibly well.
When it was announced that Sleeping Giant was being released as DLC for Guitar Hero 3, it was an instant day-one purchase for me. Playing along to it in the game only deepened my appreciation for just how rhythmically intense and layered the song really is, and it definitely pushed me to want to learn it properly on bass.
It also ended up being one of the very early tabs I uploaded to Ultimate Guitar back in 2015, and I vividly remember this song absolutely melting my brain while I was trying to get all the time signatures and rhythmic hits correct. Mastodon are never content to sit in straight 4/4 for long, and this track is a perfect example of how they love to keep you on your toes.
That brain-melting didn’t stop there either — transcribing more Mastodon over the years has continued to challenge me in all the right ways. But Sleeping Giant will always stand out as one of the first tracks that really made me realise just how deep and complex their songwriting can be, especially from a bass player’s point of view.
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