Microtiming in Metallica's “Master of Puppets” (2014)
metalintheory.com
metalintheory.com
This sort of thing happens all the time. A band gets used to the timing and they do it because it sounds cool and feels right, time signature and tempo be damned.
I drum in a death metal band. We play live without a metronome but we record with one. Last week, we were going through a song and programming the click track. It’s a process of playing a riff, figuring out the comfortable tempo and time signature, setting it in Reaper, then playing along to it until there’s a change and doing it again. We hit this one transition that has these odd pauses. It’s very Suffocation, for any death metal fans out there. We always hold out one of them in a subtle way and discovered that we couldn’t find a way to program the section! The timing we were used to, especially me as the drummer, didn’t sync up with the a tempo that made sense, it wasn’t a countable number of beats. But we also did it evenly as a band for the past year, every time we played it, all together.
We wound up just deciding that we should play it to the click, speed up the pauses just a bit. It takes away a little personality but keeps the song tight.
"You're off time...no you're off time. Oh, wait...we're all off time in different ways, let's get it right!"
Black metal is loads of fun to play on guitar :-)
The notation is a starting point to learn the baseline notes and rhythms. The actual end product is never going to actually match up 100% to the written version except maybe in like middle school.
It's in 4/4 with a 2/4 bar but it still had a lot of folks confused for a while and a whole TikTok meme that lasted for a bit.
https://melodics.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/11/a-lesson-in-c...
While I see why people say "4/4 with a 2/4 bar" -- doesn't that feel like a matter of definition?
I would just say it doesn't have a "square" pulse -- it has a pulse that's 11 or 22. To me that is the defining characteristic; that's what it sounds like.
Whether you call it 11/4 or 11/2 or "4/4 with a 2/4" bar seems to be creating a difference out of something that's not really there.
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Also nice to see The Cars "Just What I Needed" in that blog post. I remember my friend's band did a cover of it and I asked them about that "hiccup" / inversion in a pop song ... I think he said they just didn't do it ?
To me the drums have no cycle of 4, it's a "double time" beat, a cycle of 2
But I can see where people are getting the 4 from in the vocals -- there is 4-beat repetition in the vocals
But I would still say the song has a cycle of 22. That's the salient feel.
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Also a cool thing is that the "Hey Ya" background goes in 12 beats and then 10 beats. That actually supports my point. It's 22
- Drums are 11 repetitions of 2
- Background vocals are 12 + 10 -- I hear the 10 as shortened
- Main Vocals are something like 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 6 -- I actually hear the last one as lengthened, not shortened
So yeah it definitely has a polyrhythmic feel to me; calling it 4/4 and then 2/4 is imposing too much theory on reality :)
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I hear the vocals as a variation on
- 2 cycles of 12 = 24
- 6 cycles of 4 = 24
These ratios are very common for "12/8" or "12/4" polyrhythms.
But the second cycle of 12 is shortened; the last cycle of 4 is lengthened. Great song!
The map’s not the territory though
11/4 would probably indicate a large stress on the one and small stresses on the three, five etc
I would play them differently anyway
Great way to check is count the beats and never let yourself go up to four, and say 1 on the strong beats. Takes a few tries but you'll get to
1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4
pretty quick with Hey Ya.
But when I hear the whole song together, taking all instruments into account, I hear a cycle of 22. There's a polyrhythm of at least 3 different tempos:
(1) snare is a double-time tempo -- 11 repetitions, everything is accented equally, it's driving the whole song
(2) main vocal riff, bass drum, and synthy bass guitar are "regular time"
(I'm a drummer and I often hear the bass and snare at different "tempos" in many types of music. One is half or double the other, or 3:1 or 3:2 -- those ratios feel the most relevant.)
(3) Hey Ya, Hey Ha is half time -- 12 + 10
So yeah I can certainly see why if you're a drummer you would count it one way.
But I'd say the whole song is playing with and weaving together tempos, in my mind around the snare -- listen to all his vocal ad libs
"and what makes, and what makes, and what makes, and what makes" -- this is double time, following the snare
"love the exception" -- regular time
"why oh why oh", "alright alright alright alright" -- doubling the double time
So basically I hear it as a cycle of 22, and there are various tempos and rhythms laid around it. It's a gorgeous texture, and what an achievement to make it flow naturally in a pop song!
I remember listening to this song over and over again in my Bay area commute, and occasionally wondered about the time signature, but didn't get into it deeply
Another nice thing is that while the vocals do have the 4, 4, 4, ... shape, almost all accents are on the upbeat, following the snare more than the bass drum
I don't think that applying half-time/double-time to melodies is a good approach. Rhythm and tempo (note lengths, really) in melodies are more fluid to get more variation and effect. When I listen to the song, most of the passages that you quoted as changing up the rhythm (except "Hey ya! Hey ya!") sound to me as if they are actually consistently starting on a 1 beat if you count 4/4 and 2/4, but not in 22/4. So you'd tear apart the structure that you claim is there. That feels like a contradiction to me.
Also, why am I discussing music on Hacker News...? I'll happily agree to respectfully disagree at this point. I respect your view.
The reason it's mostly 4/4 is that the 4/4 measures sound self-contained. And then you have an abbreviated 2/4 turnaround.
So yeah, you could definitely notate it 11/4 if you want, but that would be a bit confusing to musicians used to thinking in shorter bars.
The really sad thing is I cannot find that old magazine any more, at best it is somewhere in my parents house in the attic in an unmarked box, at worst it got lost while moving. But yeah, that was the first time young me realized these transcriptions were not, in fact, noted down by the musicians, but done by a 3rd party whose listening and guitar playing skill differed a lot from the actual musicians and writers. I approached all other sheet music with a very high degree of caution after that "incident".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzIksH67hA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnIHVvEwbLk
It's impressive how much a song can shift from its underlying chords and retain the same vibe.
But is it worth it? You've taken away the soul of the song.
Not sure it helps, but you can use a tempo map in Reaper to basically warp the grid to your audio. In Classical and Romantic music where Tempo Rubato is pretty common this is a life-saver.
Noo whyyyyy... :( So many amateur/local bands sound so lifeless and bland on their albums, because they somehow got it into their heads that a click track should have the final say, and not their own goddamn rhythm section. Such a shame.
Doesn't it start as a schoolkid, where you too fast giving a presentation up at the board?
how can you not compress time in front of others unless you're practiced?
Sounds pretty sweet.
What a great day on Hacker News.
A long time ago, back when I had a neo-no-wave group and worked as a recording engineer, we hooked up with a number of NYC folks- Friendly Bears, Toby Driver/Kayo Dot, Colin Marston’s bands…
Now that I don’t have to grind so hard bootstrapping my software career anymore, I’ve been putting together a new group.
But who cares really- just cool being able to talk music w/ HNers.
Going totally controlled on a metrum has it's charm, but in my eyes (or ears, hehe) it should be the exception, not the rule.
I wouldn't have done that, in though it's a massive pain I would have used the tools in the DAW to change the timing to match the song, and not the other way around.
https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/lars-ulrich-hates-metallica-tra...
If you make your own transcription, it may not be more accurate, but at least it will be your version of the song.
In music, the reality is that; if it sounds good, it is good.
I've seen some youtube videos trying to analyze grunge or punk music, and you can tell they're struggling. There's such a reach for 'i think this supposed to be an inverted diminished c minor suspended 7 missing the 4th and...', and if you've ever actually been in a punk band, or seen these kids play, you know they just tried a bunch of different notes until they found what sounded good.
I cant imagine how that pisses off a lot of people with very expensive music degrees.
Well I don't think the music theory people actually think Johnny Rotten was sitting around thinking, "you know what mate, this bleedin song needs an augmented triad!" they're just trying to fit actual music to music theory, which is complex (and interesting).
That said, there’s some legend and a Guitar World interview about how Clif was the theory guy in Metallica: https://www.rocknrollinsight.com/2017/03/cliff-burtons-influ...
This discusses some timing anomalies in some Metallica music and also seemingly refutes the point that Clif was the Master of their Puppets https://metalintheory.com/metallica-and-the-case-of-the-miss...
Overall, I used to like Metallica as a kid but I hated what they did with the whole Napster thing enough that it inspired many years of amazing torrent community interaction that has brought me so much musical joy and good times. I also despise some of their decisions around mixing / overall sound of albums like Death Magnetic given that their own personal amazing rehearsal spaces are fully kitted out with Meyer Sound systems, which are fantastic and arguably the best in the world, yet their music sounds like that. Perhaps all those years playing have wrecked their ability to hear anything over 6khz.
The punk guys couldn't care less about music theory or whatever, they cared about having fun with the music and playing skills were almost irrelevant, almost frowned upon (you don't hear a lot of guitar solos in punk - it's mostly 3-note, fast paced music with rebelious lyrics... I feel so old describing it like that :D ). For a time, "broken" timing was in vogue, both in some punk bands and in a lot in metal (not sure if Metallica was a pioneer with that? I am too "young" to remember).
The metal guys were not completely different, to be honest, except for playing skills being much more important, as it's integral part of the music to have endless solos and complex riffs... but at least in my circles it was more about raw skills (how fast you could play more than, say, how much "feeling", though that was important too) than theoretical knowledge.
I have never been much of a fan of punk music but I love the punk aesthetic. That mindset really extends to so many things.
2. Lars is a pretty good drummer; anyone who doubts it should try getting through Master of Puppets without going into cardiac arrest.
3. The entire band does the lurch in unison on the record, and they do it live. It's clearly on purpose.
That said, I’ve watched some comparison videos of his drumming vs more expressive and I can understand where people are coming from :,)
All that being said, I think this timing strangeness could absolutely have started because that's how Lars played it (intentional or not), and everyone adapted to him because it's cool.
TBF, they are all talented, but they are really something else entirely as a band.
From what I've seen it's mostly amateur experts and single-tradition performers that have the prescriptive "top down" view of theory. If you're actually playing a lot of different types of music with a lot of different types of musicians you just can't avoid noticing what doesn't fit into it.
I've had similar experiences trying to transcribe non-western folk music, like Bata drumming from Cuba. You can definitely notate it, but the formal structure of the songs doesn't fit well into traditional notation, so it is necessarily an incomplete technique that more or less HAS to be married to audio recordings or videos if you want to learn the music at a later point.
This is not limited to punk bands, it's common to nearly all folk music. I think anyone with a music theory would probably be very aware that the analysis tools are mostly only useful for certain styles.
edit: Here's someone who "get's it" - academic analysis, but clearly understands that it was likely arrived at organically https://www.youtube.com/@metalmusictheory5401
At base - chords, scales, keys - it all relates back to fifths, the most harmonic interval. That's based on physics, not Western classical music.
All languages ultimately relate to the way humans produce sound. That does not mean that English linguistics is tremendously useful in analyzing Japanese, even if it's better than nothing.
We have bone flutes with pentatonic tuning that are ~50 thousand years old. We have written records of scales, including major and minor, that are older than Ancient Greece.
And if scales are that old, then so are keys, and so are chords; no?
A young banjo player asks to jam with the old timers at the sawmill. Sure, they say, and invite him in. As they play for awhile, the youngun asks the elder picker, "Say, old man, can you even read music?" to which the elder replies, "Not enough to ruin my playin'"
I can tell you an interesting counterexample: there's another song where if you don't get the microtiming you're not even close to the riff. "Mmm-bop" by Hanson.
In that one, the main drive of the song is eighths and sixteenths, but accents in the MAIN chorus hook are actually sixteenth triplets. If you overlay an insanely fast rhythm onto the song that's doing a frantic 'onetwothreeonetwothree!' it lines up perfectly with bits of the 'bop-doowop' vocal. This same trick also exists in the biggest Ace of Base hits, but instead of the vocal riff, it's the kick drum happening on triplets.
Hanson mentioned in interviews how people couldn't cover 'Mmmbop' properly, because they'd simplify the timing. If you covered Master of Puppets, you'd have to get the timing right as well :) this implies that Hanson, if they wanted, could do Master Of Puppets properly because they can hear timing that fast and would recognize what it was…
It's not really analogous to what's going on in master of puppets
It's beyond common, not something Hanson would be singled out for.
Hanson put out a joke video of them covering a Slipknot song, so yeah, I think they could.
Hanson has been the butt of many jokes, but they're an incredibly tight band with plenty of talent.
- Christie Front Drive (Wooden Blue Records, 1995)
- Jejune (Big Wheel Recreation, 1997)
- Blueprint (Abridged Records, 1996)
- Sense Field
- Mineral
Pretty wild for a band that got a lot of airtime on Total Request Live
Copeland and Carter Beauford are two of my favorite drummers to dissect their groves for their ability to quickly wander and then return to the beat.
Punchline:
> What makes this rhythmic idiosyncracy different from what has been studied by most music theorists is that this slightly attenuated beat is performed by the whole ensemble in unison, and it’s not a delay that is “made up for” right afterwards. In other words, it’s not a local deviation from the beat that maintains the pulse over a longer span of music, but a permanent shift of where the beat occurs.
Satisfying explanation for one of the more unsettling measures of rhythm in any genre of music.
Personally, I never thought too hard about this measure when listening but it definitely stuck out to me. It felt like some kind of slightly rushed triplet rhythm, reminiscent of that Romantic tendency to throw triplets into a melody (did anyone else play piano and struggle to master the timing of these triplets?). This feel seems confirmed by the signature proposed in a sibling comment, 21/32, which has the decimal value 21/32 = 0.65625 when interpreted as a fraction. Very close to two thirds, just a tiny bit sped up.
Rhythm is not meant to be perfect in performance, so my intuition is that "slightly sped up two thirds" was closer to their intention than 21/32.
When the engineers first rewound the master tapes for Justice they thought the tape was being shredded because the tape machine was making a very strange noise. When they stopped to take a look, they saw thousands and thousands of tiny tape edits. Apparently that was key to how Flemming Rasmussen got the drums so locked in. Hand editing and splicing every beat.
The sound the engineers heard that they thought was the tape shredding was the sound of all of those hand edits flying over the tape head.
- It would be incredibly laborious, and the possibility you'd mess the tape up and require another "good take" from a performer is way too high. You can do a few splices; you can't do 1000s of them.
- You generally can't do this w/ drums because of cymbals.
Tldr: band was mourning cliff’s death and giving newsted grief.
This isn’t really seen as bad though, more like ”despite the fact that they aren’t as tight as say… Devin Townsend, Chuck Schuldiner, Neal Pert etc…they have the heaviest music“
So while this theory is great, it doesn’t disprove the folk theory that Lars sucks.
Then you got the ageing, not keeping shape, rich Lars who's become somewhat infamous for not being a very tight drummer, and that's definitely been true for several periods of his later career.
He's also well know for having a somewhat unconventional and mechanically inefficient technique. This was fine when he was younger, and less fine once he started getting older.
I guess my point is, playing "accurately" (according to the traditional musical rhythmic grid) and "precisely" (repeatably) are independent skills. I for one am stronger in the latter than the former.
And Justice For All was his last album at the helm and that was 1988 still to early to do that sort of thing digitally (ProTools came out in the early 90s) and no one is hand cutting tape for each beat. Even the Black Album is still early for that level of manipulation in 1991.
Which isn't to say he didn't use a click or many many takes and tracks to help ...
Today, every piece of pop music, at least, is quantized to the point where the accuracy is perfect, but also sterile of feeling, as discussed in any number of Rick Beato videos.
Admittedly, I know very little beyond high school band, but the theory always felt arbitrary. Like, whenever I would try to drill down on something like why notes are the frequencies they are, I eventually got to “We don’t know.” That left me thinking either only that teacher didn’t know or the theory was BS.
Now I see it was neither. Music is something we irrational, inscrutable humans made up. Music theory, even at its most brilliant, is just an approximation. I always thought music theory describe fundamental, physical truths that humans intuitively discovered. Now I see that music theory describes our intuitive understanding.
Sort of like how a recipe calls for 1/4 tsp salt but people just use a pinch. I thought the people were being imprecise. But it’s really that the recipe cannot precisely capture all the variables in cooking that actually makes “a pinch of salt” a more precise description.
I think people go into a music theory course and want it to be like math or physics where you can plug and chug to get an answer (where the answer is "good" music) - but that's not really what's going on. The tools that music theory gives you are those to understand how a piece of music has been constructed, and if you want to apply that to creating new music you can try using those structures in your own work. It's still up to you (or really, your audience) to decide if it's "good."
But then you seem to go on to explain that it's actually not prescriptive. If it sounds good, it is good. Theory is sometimes useful to make it sound good.
There _are_ some fundamental physical truths in music (related to overtones, wavelengths, etc), but the funny thing is that most of our "music theory" has actually had to bodge those truths a bit to accommodate variety and playability.
(For example, listen to a major third on a just intoned instrument versus an equal temperament instrument like a guitar!)
Theory is the wrong word
A lot of bands do this kind of "crazy stuff", though, not just Metallica, and it was almost a signature thing "back in the days."
One of my other favorites in newer times is Iron Maiden's quite dramatic "rhythm reversal" or "step-back" in Sign of the Cross.[0]
Master of Puppets has the same sort of feel going on. Chugging on 4/4, and then a lurchy measure of truncated 3/4 (like 2.5/4 and change). It doesn't feel "5/8-y" to me at all. It's fundamentally not on the meter - it's a groove. Much like non-Western tone systems don't map squarely onto 12 equal tones (or even 24). It's just a different schema.
I don't know if it was a conscious or subconscious choice, or if it just "sounds sick, man", but I feel like the solid 4/4 pulse that gets you headbanging, and then a measure which just gets yanked out from under, really invokes the feeling of someone who doesn't have control, who is having their strings pulled.
Same here, if you were to play the notes based on the scores, it wouldn't feel like the Metallica song, even though you played it "correct".
Without this, the groove will feel wooden and stifled.
The drummer essentially plays two rhythms at once. His hands mostly do 4/4, but feet play a shorter phrase that only lines up with hands every couple of bars. It's like simultaneously counting to four on one hand and to three on the other hand, but using four limbs on a full drum kit, adding accents, ghost notes, changing time signates, and not skipping a freaking beat.
And their every song is like this. I also think on "Combustion" he plays 1/16 note off from the rest of the band.
But watching "Jazz drummer reacts" video for "Bleed" made my head spin. The speed, precision, complexity of those rhythms - I cannot comprehend what it is like inside his mind while he's playing. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpooH-TGtBg]
"Clockworks" is another one that makes me question my sanity.
HUMANIZE: MIDI effect - adjust the amount of randomness and probability, changing the velocity of the steps
in the pattern and slightly moving the recorded steps further from their relative position.
Each time a pattern is repeated, the humanize will change its internal values.
plays it out of time
Rest of the band likely just got used to his idiosyncratic playing and adapted.
At some point I think we have to put the “it was a freak accident that was repeated with precision over and over, forever” argument to bed.
Probably we limit ourselves a lot if we're too confined to those without being able to express our energy
But someone who is trained explicitly to play exact integer divisions will have trouble expressing their energy as much
There is a difference between the crude musical notation and how it's actually meant to be played - a notation showing 4 quarter notes in a 4/4 beat does not imply that the correct way to play them is to literally have 4 identical notes with idential gaps; even without any explicit extra notation (which indicates significant changes) there is an implied understanding that there should be a variation in velocity (and, for a skilled practicioner, not a random one, but placing slight emphasis as required) and a variation in timing (again, for a skilled player not random but e.g. depending on the music genre a slight shuffle or an intentional shift of one beat); this variation is not a flaw of imperfect execution, but required to properly play the music as intended.
I didn't get the impression that "humanizing" was much of a concern.
Does the 808 fall into this category? It's been used in a lot of songs that sound good.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0111... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00578-5
I appreciate it might "just" be a matter of Metallica "playing it by feel" rather than having sat down and composed it on a scoreboard first.
If one composes things "by feel" it becomes then pretty difficult to transcribe them precisely.
The 5/8 “stutter” in the verse almost certainly came from the original riff track, and when Lars had to add a drum beat to it, he simply mirrored what James was doing, and that’s how it made its way into the song. It’s not really rocket science.
my observation is that transcriptions of recorded music are a lot like text that tries to convey the sound of the spoken word, for example when an author intentionally spells (misspells) words phonetically to capture a speaker's accent or manner of speaking. It's an approximation that tries to split the difference between accuracy and scrutability; you want to try to capture the essence of the sound but if nobody can make sense of the words on the page then it doesn't work. So in the case of Master of Puppets, you have a sound on the record which doesn't really correspond to anything, Metallica weren't writing scores, and so if you create a transcription you have to use context and your judgement with the notation. But really the main goal is not to produce notation which is scrupulous in its accuracy but rather to have something that won't be a pain in the ass for sight readers, and if you've ever worked with something like The Real Book, its very subjective and it takes a lot of experience to know what makes some notation better than others.
"Battery" is certainly not the same type of "whatever" as "Master of Puppets". It's also not cut short. They're adding in an extra beat (a quarter note), resulting in one measure of 5/4 (or an extra measure of 1/4, but the notation makes more sense in 5/4). I think it's clear that this was intentionally and explicitly composed with an extra beat (Metallica adds or removes quarter notes in riffs fairly often).
"Master of Puppets" on the other hand was very likely not intentionally composed in 21/32, but I think it was intentionally composed with the "microtiming" in mind as a feeling.
A lot of people in this thread seem to think it may have just been Lars's fault as a crappy drummer. But James was notoriously meticulous with the tightness of that album as a whole (and AJFA). This is not sloppiness and it's not 21/32. It was intentionally composed by feel or by informal directing ("let's do that part by skipping a little, like ba-DUM-DUM, you know?").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQp_QIzd7w
and playing my favorite, Scarlatti:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQm8I8EXZf8
If you did a similar analysis using Audacity as in the article, I'm sure you could find some interesting patterns. Would be nifty to have a deep neural net learn how to mimic this based on a "straight" midi file that doesn't use micro-articulations.
Today you'd throw it up in a DAW and see Lars just can't stick to the groove (everybody knows this).
Metallica like a lot of bands was just self taught and figured out a lot of things intuitively. In the end music theory takes a back seat to "it sounds cool" when you're talking rock & metal.
Metallica does a bunch of stuff like stick a big portion of a song on one chord and not even bother changing then play some notes that don't make sense with that chord/scale and it's all "whatever" cause it sounds cool. Or typical stuff like go to a chord that doesn't necessarily make sense but it doesn't really matter since they're just playing root-5th chords and it doesn't sound off the way it would with more fully voiced chords.
These days I realize that my experience is atypical and many (most?) have some sort of intuitive feel for this thing, it's not just me being dumb for not understanding fancy music theory but that my experience/perception of music is different.
So I wonder, how much do you hear harmonic changes in a given piece of music? Maybe a better way, for you, to develop an ear for rhythm is to focus on the regularity of those harmonic movements, which are what really "suggest" a meter in the first place. In most music, rhythm really is just the subdivisions of those larger "beats" implied by the harmony, and discussions like the OP end up being more or less "Oh, this is interesting because it doesn't line up with the expectations that accompany rest of the surrounding music"
> it doesn't line up with the expectations
This idea of expectations comes up often when up when discussing music, and I get the impression that that people have stronger expectations than I do.
This whole situation leads funnily enough me happily listening all sorts of "complicated" music (jazz/prog/classical/electronica), not because I appreciate the complexity in any intellectual way, but because it just sounds fun. That of course doesn't help me reinforce any music pattern parts of my brain if I listen music that intentionally breaks all the conventions and "rules"
A lot of those preconceptions are to do with the stresses in a bar/measure. Things like when drums are hit or when melodies begin and progress. Misusing this leads to the same effect as stressing the wrong syllables in speech. Something like a waltz (which is 3/4) depends on stresses in a pattern of 3 beats, matching the dance. If you write a waltz as the same notes in 4/4 the patterns that should align on 3rd notes will not relate to the written form. Stresses are also why 3/4 and 6/8 are distinct - they are identical in values but the grouping of notes is not. They can also differ because the actual rhythm as played can differ from how it is written i.e. swing.
If you imagine the melody along with 'twinkle twinkle little star' and stop, it should feel unresolved because of the note it ends on. You need 'how I wonder what you are' to feel comfortable again. These two phrases should have a relation and similar grouping. It's harder to notice but within each of these phrases there's a pair of bars that have a similar relation.
Free time does not imply the lack of patterns. Check out Gnossiennes for example, they have very distinct patterns: https://musescore.com/classicman/scores/4131536
I have no idea if that sounds "normal" or not to others, to me it works perfectly fine.
Pick some reference event, like how your foot would want to tap along with the song. If you listen, something in that song (perhaps the snare drum) occurs twice as frequently. Doubling again, perhaps the hi-hat. In the other direction, halving the frequency of your foot-tap might coincide with a chord change. Halving the chord changes may reveal repetitive patterns in the lyrics. Eventually big chunks of the song (verse/chorus/solo) reveal themselves to start on some 2^n number of toe taps.
My favorite example of this is "Your Love" by The Outfield. If you play it alongside an incrementing counter in binary[1], you can see how certain instruments/elements align with changes in one of the bit positions. When large runs of bits roll over to zero, that tends to coincide with important structural points in the song.
I've shown these to drummers and they geek out on it. Sorry for going off topic but there is a recent Metallica video where they are talking about Phish's 13-night run at MSG, so this reminded me of that.
- People discussing their love for the music
- Geeking out about Metallica's songwriting, and playing in general
- Trashing Lars
It's a popular thing to do but one thing people never talk about is how influential he was in writing all those songs back in the day. Him and James Hetfield would sit down with all the riffs and piece them together to create songs. Lars was super important in this and had really great taste in terms of styling the music the "Metallica" way. He was very good at knowing what "sounds good" and directing the arrangement of the songs.
All the good will he burned up with Napster I think he never recovered from in the eyes of fans.
It's like learning a complex dance as a set of bland, unguided position changes, and having to rely upon observation of the actual performance in order to replicate the rhythm, timing and other fine detail.
The early years/decades of the internet saw a particular boom in this style of self-learning. A state-of-affairs which means that a sizeable portion of self-taught musicians - certainly guitar and bass players - from the 90's and 00's, would navigate these, shall we call them 'rebel phrases', with a certain advantage born of unconventional learning approach. That is to say, a significant amount of playing-what-you-hear was de rigeur with the tablature-based style of learning. They never learned the traditional notation conventions in the first place, and thus had no need to break from them, in order to replicate these weird parts.
All that said, experienced players have long known that "official" music notation publications in this style of music (rock/metal) almost always require imbibing with a few grains of salt. To paraphase Dimebag Darrell, a renowned musician in this area: the extra magic, the X factor, it comes from the fine detail, the slurs and variations, the things that are by nature more difficult to define and achieve.
This was one of the first metal songs I've ever learned on guitar, and learning from Guitar Pro, I've never questioned the timing - but listening carefully now, the 5/8 bar seems to actually fit in 3/8. It's like they had the metronome on when playing (or just Lars being a bozo), then tried to fit the riff into the time.
Whatever it is, the real recording definitely sounds better than the surgically-precise Guitar Pro playback.
One peculiar thing about the riff is how the chorus is actually played B-B-B-B-C-B-C-C-C-C-D#-B, but I always thought it was C-C-C-C-C-B-C-C-C-C-D#-B, since that's how it sounds on the recording. But tabs always say it's B. I guess they just palm muted it really hard...
More in general, it's absolutely wrong to think that modern music, especially rock, is adequately represented on a score or tablature, there's so much missing information on timing, volume, color...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA
Larnell Lewis Hears "Enter Sandman" For The First Time (and plays the drum part)
[1] Analysis - https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/11599/what-is-the-...
[2] Live Performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDU-vilgic
They found something that kicked ass and worked and went with it. Or they just sort of lucked out with errors that worked well.
This reminds me of the famous Dave Brubeck Quartet song Blue Rondo a la Turk, which has a 2+2+3 rhythm, and I always remember the rhythm by remembering, "Taco taco taco burrito."
The use of click tracks have become so prevalent that the ability to do something that does not conform with the western "way" of making music is severely hampered
Personally this saddens me, though I'm not blind to how much the barrier of entry has been lowered for creating music
See the first minute of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEBp9ulELLA
If you have good speakers, the effect can almost feel like the source of the sound is rotating around you.
Advantage, humans.
- Buddy Rich
I have also walked the halls of geeky academia where people wrinkle their noses and call these musicians average (at best) while they themselves have wet dreams of being half as celebrated. I think for many it is jealousy. They would more often than not rate musicians on a scale from Great to Bad that is completely aligned with Great Technique to Bad Technique and funnily also completely reversed from Unsuccessful to Successful. Also see “Wine experts”.
Had more to do with luck, knowing the right people and having the right look than anything to do with drumming ability.
How popular something is, or how much money the artist makes, doesn’t even enter the equation.
People like what they like. Whether other people also like it seems beside the point.
From the artist’s point of view, hopefully they are making the art that they love. Trying to do something because you think it will sell is business, not art.
But is that all there is to it? Should not the drumming serve the song? I don't believe a lot of Metallica's music would be improved by making the drumming more technically impressive (at least for their earlier stuff, I have my gripes about the drumming in their last couple of albums). Their style is simply one which benefits much more from the unique but easy grooves rather than highly technically impressive drumming. And IMO, this simplicity is one of the things which distinguishes them from most other metal bands. I love myself some Slipknot, but I would not love that kind of drumming on Metallica tracks.
If I wanted to claim he's a terrible drummer, I would point to his inability to keep up live, how he has a habit of simplifying parts and missing timings in a way that sounds bad.