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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a postdoc back at uni (Axel Tidemann) who was working on an AI-drummer. I'm not a musician, but he explained to me it was easy to make a drum-program play a beat perfectly. But it wouldn't sound good. It would have no feel, no personality, no "signature style". Making it play imperfectly, but in a believable way, was the challenge. (I think it even simulated the way a drummer moves, aka not just using a pre-recorded sample of someone hitting a drum)

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".

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As a drummer who also programs drums, shifting individual hits around by 1 ms is easily perceptible and has a big impact on the feel of a groove. I will always go through each drum element separately and figure out, by ear, what the specific offset should be. This goes especially for percussive parts lacking a transient.

Without this, the groove will feel wooden and stifled.

As a curiosity, that's the difference in timing you'd get if you moved the individual drum in a drum set 30 cm closer or further from the listener.

Haha that’s a cool fact. By implication you’ll hear a slightly different groove as the drummer than your audience.

The closest a human can arrive to AI drumming levels is Tomas Haake of Meshuggah. [Reference](https://youtu.be/bAJ1WTGNISk).

George Kollias has always been my go-to extreme drummer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqzZmNqdWck]

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.

For the people that don't see anything special here apart from the feet going kinda fast. This band is known from playing wild time signatures. Like playing riffs in 11/8 and throwing in 3/8 every couple of bars.

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.

I find this video (series) helps break down Bleed pretty nicely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcsAAPdJTBE

I am not sure what you mean with AI level drumming, but what about Tool’s Danny Carey though? I am not a drummer, but to me this is super impressive.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FssULNGSZIA

I have a drum computer [0] that has a "humanize" knob; the manual says the following:

    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.

In theory it'll make the drum computer sound more human / imperfect. However, professional drummers can play super tight (as shown in the article, .15 second precision strikes, and Hammett isn't even the best out there) and in some cases will have their strikes triggered, normalized and / or cleaned up for the album, so humanizing a drum beat is more for live performances I think?

[0] https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/unodrum/

Yeah, but it's more than just adding some "random" timings. Because I think that for a real drummer, the timings are biased. For instance, after hitting a drum far away, the timing/speed/power at which you hit the next drum is different than if you hit a different drum right before.

Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica, is widely considered to a mediocre drummer, in terms of technique. His style is distinctive but cannot be called precise. The timing on Master of Puppets is likely due to a fluke during the songwriting/rehearsal process. “Hey guys, this 5/8 thing sounds really cool, I think we’re really nailing it now!”

plays it out of time

Rest of the band likely just got used to his idiosyncratic playing and adapted.

…and he did that, consistently, with only a few millisecond variations, on exactly the same beat of the same riff, for the entirety of just that one song, and in live performances?

Drumming and generally keeping rhythm is a physical thing. You move your body parts (e.g. bopping head, swaying hips etc.) and it couples with how and when you're playing.

Are you suggesting his movements in this one measure were so unique that they exactly doubled the length of one eighth note?

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.

With n=1, for me there is a groove or three that are just muscle memory and I'd need a longer while to sit down and think if asked write them down. They came out from noodling around and coming to "huh, that sounds cool" and I imagine that's not something particularly uncommon for other people too.

I think we lost the thread here. I wasn't suggesting Lars had millisecond-level intrinsic timing and an innovative approach to music theory. I was rejecting the idea that this beat came from incompetence. I think developing an interesting groove and being able to play it consistently in a song, and in live performances for years is evidence of drumming competence.

You don’t play music, do you? It’s absolutely possible to learn a rhythm, groove or melody wrong, and to rehearse it until it sounds so right, the anything else sounds wrong to you. But your audience would notice.

As a musician, I do not find this surprising at all. It's easy to internalize "incorrect" rhythms and pitches.

"practice makes permanent"

That's why you want to practice _slooowly_ but perfectly before you speed up. That way mistakes can't take root.

Did he do that consistently or is it just an artifact seen in a single very heavily edited record? Is the same timing seen in this section of live concert recordings during those years?

I have not been a metal head for many years but my recollection is that the live albums and bootlegs have timing that varies all over the place. Especially on MoP and Battery, and a few other notable ones (The Four Horsemen) which have complicated rhythms.

Yes, that's how playing music works. Whatever you do on your first playthrough is what you'll do on every playthrough if you don't specifically try to change it. Consistently reproducing a mistake is generally much easier than unlearning the mistake.

I really wouldn't be surprised if "5/8" wasn't even mentioned anywhere until long after that part of the song was thought up. It just sounds good.

Integer subdivisions are kinda arbitrary too as well

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

Rick Beato says the typical 90s band would replace their drummer with a studio pro or drum machine for their first album, since they just weren't precise enough.

I didn't get the impression that "humanizing" was much of a concern.

It's not (solely) random imperfections - a good drum groove will have intentional specific deviations from the "theoretically exact" (bad) beat timing, no matter if done by a human or a properly engineered digital track.

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.

.15 second precision sounds like a huge margin of error for a pro drummer, or any pro musician for that matter

it was easy to make a drum-program play a beat perfectly. But it wouldn't sound good.

Does the 808 fall into this category? It's been used in a lot of songs that sound good.

Though the 808's timing grid is rigid, its timing is notably jittery to the degree that users of more modern and precise drum machines go out of their way to recreate said jitteriness: https://www.elektronauts.com/t/simulating-the-808-909-mpc-gr...

Great musicians vary the timing and other parameters according to the live situation / mood / acoustics / audience. It is never the same.

Agreed, the mind is running a predictive model as we listen to music. The structure and the deviation from structure all play into our mental model of anticipation and emotional response. Some of it is intentional and part of the composition but some is part of the experience that a live musician can impart in their music.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0111... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00578-5

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