Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehutch79 | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a bunch of comments about how the reality is that it's not some genius microtiming, it's that Lars just wasn't that tight of a drummer.

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.

View on HN

> i think this supposed to be an inverted diminished c minor suspended 7 missing the 4th

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).

Uh, you might actually want to watch some of these videos. You're right it's not everyone, some people are doing the whole 'this is why it works'. But there are a lot of people who are very mistaken about how a lot of other people make music.

My understanding is for a lot of punk at least, they played what they could play fast, and what sounded all right, yeah?

Yeah pretty much. All you need is a power chord to get started.

My brother was in a punk band... and I was in a metal band...

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.

It is even more than that. The punk musical aesthetic is that you don't even need to know how to play the instrument at all.

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.

Example?

I'll try and see if i can find the specific examples later, after work. They guy that doodles on music sheets/ruled notbooks while talking, doign a nin song, is the first that comes to mind.

Yeah, I still watch them to try to pick up more theory on “why” something sounds good or has a particular feel, but a lot of this stuff came because the people making it knew what they liked and picked something 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.

It is kind of funny to me because the spirit of punk is all about flaunting authority to piss off people who are used to having complete control.

1. Yeah I agree, but

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.

Re Lars as a drummer, my first encounter with the band was both late and epic. It was via a double disc dvd set of their live symphony and Metallica performance. Watching Lars drum himself to exhaustion was goosebump inducing. 10/10 would love him again for his performances.

That said, I’ve watched some comparison videos of his drumming vs more expressive and I can understand where people are coming from :,)

Lars is definitely a good drummer. He's not technical but he's good and I think there's a perfect balance in that he lets the guitars shine. It's very much a guitar-driven band and he helps make it happen. If Gene Hoglan was their drummer it would be a very different band.

Lars is technical, he's just not proficient in a traditional way. He's incredibly creative and plays things oddly (compared to his contemporaries), which a lot of traditional drummers call "wrong". Never made sense to me why Jimi Hendrix was a genius but Lars gets ridiculed, they're very similar in that way. He didn't keep up his chops as he aged and now has trouble playing a lot of the things he wrote when he was younger. But his contributions to the songwriting and very unique style influenced a generation.

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.

Comparing Lars to Jimi Hendrix isn't just a stretch, they're lightyears away from each other in skill and in my opinion, musical impact. To be clear I'm a huge fan both Metallica and Jimi. I played drums for about 15 years and I'd call most of Lars drumming proficient and consistent in style, if not a little boring.

I'm a huge fan of Metallica as well, and I think both they and most fans would say that individually, anyone of them isn't the best, but Metallica is really a case of the sum being greater than the parts.

TBF, they are all talented, but they are really something else entirely as a band.

My experience has mostly been that people with non-performance music degrees are very comfortable with the idea of theory as a communication tool based on certain practices & expectations that has sharp limitations when going outside of them. With some powerful exceptions of course.

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.

Yes, exactly! I have a couple of "expensive music degrees" and in my experience, most folks within the academy who are applying western-tradition theory and analysis on non-western-tradition practices are doing it full well knowing it's a limited lens to use. It's usually a pragmatic move, because the alternative ways of discussing the music are sometimes not very clear, or you end up using time stamps generated in audacity to try to demonstrate "they kind of rush this 5/8 bar, but it still sounds cool and carries a lot of energy with 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.

I think you're missing the point. Sure, the bands did it because it sounded the way they wanted, and may not have had any deeper justification. But a music theorist is going analyze the music to try and understand _why_ it sounds the way it does. Trying to fit it into idiomatic in the traditions of jazz or European classical music is one tool for doing this. It may not be the best tool, but it does provide some insight.

I feel this way about the "David Bennett Piano" channel on YouTube. He discusses various music theory topics, illustrated with examples drawn from pop and rock songs. In particular, he often singles out Radiohead as being a source of music-theoretic innovation in rock music - it's quite clear he has considerable admiration for them. The thing is though...I'm not sure if it's always the case that Radiohead were consciously using a particular scale or meter on a given song, or whether it's simply that they were out of tune and played sloppily. Some of the rationalisation being presented on the channel feels like a stretch, particularly in Radiohead's case.

Jonny Greenwood has always been a huge music theory nerd.

Disagree on that one. Radiohead and Greenwood specifically are very well known for purposely using obscure music scales and forms. Greenwood’s film scoring approach sort of proves this.

> I cant imagine how that pisses off a lot of people with very expensive music degrees.

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

Indeed, the entirety of Western music theory exists first and foremost in the context of Western common practice period ("classical") music. The further you diverge from that specific context, the more trouble you jave trying to make the abstraction fit the music.

What are you calling "the entirety of Western music theory"?

At base - chords, scales, keys - it all relates back to fifths, the most harmonic interval. That's based on physics, not Western classical music.

Chords, scales, and keys are all Western concepts. You might want to study some non-Western music traditions, in many of which harmony plays little role. Or even Western ones not based on quintal harmony, like a lot of jazz, not to mention all the experimentation in atonality in 20th century Western art 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.

Sorry - scales are a western concept?

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?

Isn't the old joke...

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 think this is just like what you see at a modern art museum. Somebody puts a toilet on a pedestal or paints a smiley face and there's going to be people who say it's art and others that groan.

music theory is not for writing music, it's for understanding it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com