Ingo Schwichtenberg

Ingo Schwichtenberg was Helloween's founding drummer and the author of one of the most copied rhythmic patterns in European heavy metal. Born in Hamburg in 1965, he assembled the band in 1984 with Kai Hansen, Michael Weikath and Markus Grosskopf, and his playing on Keeper of the Seven Keys, Part 1 (1987) and Part 2 (1988) established how power metal would sound from then on. What he did looked simple and was not. The fast, continuous beat that became the genre's trademark — steady kick, snare marking the off-beat, open cymbals sustaining the energy — sounds mechanical in most of the bands that copied it. In Schwichtenberg there was swing: he pushed and pulled within the bar, gave uneven weight to the strokes and treated tempo as something alive. It is the difference between "I Want Out" and the hundreds of tracks that tried to sound like it. His health deteriorated in the early 1990s. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and struggled with substance dependence, a condition that worsened on tour and made the band's routine impossible to keep. He was dismissed from Helloween in 1993. He died on 8 March 1995, aged 29, taking his own life in Hamburg. Helloween dedicated Master of the Rings (1994) and the track "Time" to him, and his death remains one of the most remembered in German metal.