Send Away The Tigers: What It Actually Is
Bring Me The Horizon released "Send Away The Tigers" as a song in 2008 on their album There Is a Hell Believe Me I've Seen It. There Is a Heaven Let's Keep It a Secret. The band was still operating in the metalcore space at that point, though they were already starting to stretch toward more melodic territory. The track runs about four minutes and fifteen seconds, featuring Oli Sykes on vocals and a structure that's more progressive than their earlier material. I'm not going to reproduce the full lyrics here because those are copyrighted, but I can tell you what you need to know if you're trying to learn or perform the song.
Where to Find Send Away The Tigers Lyrics
The official lyrics are available on the band's website, Genius, and AZLyrics. You can also find them on Spotify and Apple Music when you stream the track. Those platforms display synchronized lyrics in real time, which is useful if you're trying to track along. For performance purposes, the most reliable source I've used is the official tablature on Songsterr or Ultimate-Guitar. They align the lyrics with the tab, so you can see where each line lands in the arrangement. This matters more than you'd think because the vocal phrasing in this song doesn't always follow a simple verse-chorus pattern.
Learning the Song: What You Need to Know
The guitar tuning is standard E-A-D-G-B-E. That's unusual for a BMTH song from this era and it's one of the first things people get wrong. The riff is played clean with light distortion, mostly using power chords and open strings. The main melody guitar sits in the higher register, which makes it easy to muddy up if your amp gain is too hot. Vocally, Oli stays mostly in his clean tenor range here. He switches to his more aggressive tone only in the bridge section, and even then it's controlled compared to what he was doing on Periphery-era stuff. If you're covering this, don't try to replicate the scream on the first attempt. The song relies on the dynamic contrast between the clean verses and the heavier bridge. Lose that contrast and the whole arrangement falls apart. One thing I ran into personally when transcribing this: the drum pattern in the second chorus uses a ride cymbal pattern that isn't notation-standard. It's a hybrid between a punk rock beat and a straight eighth-note groove. I spent about forty-five minutes trying to get it right on paper before I just learned it by ear off the record. Writing it down didn't help because the hi-hat accents land in unexpected places. If you're learning this song, spend more time tracking it by listening than by reading tabs.
Get the Full Details
The bridge section at around 2:40 is where the song shifts tempo slightly. It's not a full tempo change, but the feel pulls back a bit. This is easy to miss if you're playing along to a metronome because the click doesn't move. Play along to the track instead and let the natural push and pull guide you.
Common Mistakes People Make
Here are a few things I see regularly when people attempt this song: The opening guitar part is played with pick harmonics and open string ringing. A lot of players try to damp the open strings too aggressively and it kills the resonance the song depends on. Let the strings ring. Light palm muting only when the chord changes demand it. The bass line follows the root notes but adds passing tones in the verses. Bassists tend to simplify this to just root movement, which makes the chorus hit less hard when everything comes back in together.
The vocal melody uses a lot of melisma in the pre-chorus. If you're just singing straight syllables you'll sound flat even if you're hitting the right notes. The emotion in that section comes from the vowel slides, not from the pitch alone. One counter-intuitive thing about this track: it sounds bigger when you play it quieter. The production on the record layers a lot of reverb and delay on the clean guitars, which creates width. When you're playing live or recording a cover, cranking the gain makes it sound cramped. Dial back the distortion and turn up the ambience effects instead. The clarity will carry more weight in a mix. If you're looking to record this and want a reference mix, I usually start with the original at about sixty percent volume and build around it. You don't need to match the production exactly, but having that balance in your head helps you make decisions about what to emphasize and what to leave alone. The song works because nothing dominates too early. Everything earns its place in the arrangement over the course of four minutes.
Send Away The Tigers Lyrics are widely available through the channels I mentioned above. The song itself is straightforward enough that most intermediate players can pick it up in a weekend, but the details that make it sound right are the things you won't find in a beginner tab.
