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Comment by reidrac | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the "bad drummer" meme. The drum parts in any Metallica song are perfect for the song and you can tell his style by listening to the drums alone.

Even if it was just serviceable, he's Metallica's drummer, so he's going to be criticised anyway.

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It’s just that he’s technically not good, that’s all. Like he drifts with time and isn’t very precise. I think the band would sound better if he were more competent. The same could be said of Kirk’s solos; even though he’s performed some classic and memorable guitar parts, on the whole they’re pretty bland.

I think for quite some time James and Jason were the best musicians in the band. Now Trujillo is far and away the most serious and capable musician among them.

That’s not to take away from the whole package. Cleary together they do (or did) something people love. But there is some objective notion of musical skill and capability that you can judge them by, and Lars is just not that great.

There's something I don't understand. He's been a drummer for 40 years now. How can he still be "not good"?

Probably because he doesn’t dedicate himself to the craft. Musicians tend to get better with age, not worse.

To a point. Drumming requires a lot more stamina than other instruments, so after a certain point, drummers have a hard time playing as well as they did when younger. We're seeing this now with Iron Maiden's Nicko McBrain, who's over 70. It's not like this for guitars/bass, but again with Iron Maiden, people are saying that they aren't running around the stage they way they did in the past.

Age isn't Lars's problem though.

the only time they didn't criticize him was back in the 90s when the whole band was high on drugs all the time, I guess.

He's probably better than anyone in The Clash for example

Technical prowess only goes so far, Metallica got where it got with him, and in the end it's a moot point

Yeah maybe he's not the best drummer, but it was good enough to get them where they got

I think I made all of that pretty clear in my comment. I was just explaining the “bad drummer” meme.

The impression I've got from reading a bit around this is that Lars can write great drum parts (especially great Metallica drum parts), and he can them play well enough... with sufficient practice.

The trouble is, so I've read, that he doesn't like to practice and doesn't do it as much as he "ought" to. Especially given Metallica's position in the industry/culture.

So he can go into a studio and record a great drum track... but it'll take him a bunch of takes to get right. For the other band members, who've put in the practice and shown up to the studio with their parts dialled in, that's frustrating and the source of a fair amount of tension. And while everyone misses a note or two in the course of an hour+ live show, the lack of practice means Lars tends to fluff a line a bit more frequently than the other members. But also, because of how fundamental the drum track is for keeping everyone else together, when Lars misses it causes more problems for the performance than when James, Kirk or Robert do.

Have you seen Metallica live? Lars is allllll over the place with his drumming, to the point where "live" recordings are heavily edited. Nothing wrong with the editing, but if you pull up some videos on youtube comparing fan recording and official release, you'll see how bad it is sometimes.

I'm not even sure that he is a drummer -- that is, someone who has a passion for the instrument and devotes a significant part of his life to improving his technique and skill set. It is not even up for debate that his playing has deteriorated over the decades. His on-stage blunders would be embarrassing even in a high school band.

I think he just stopped caring at some point, being satisfied with his success and never practicing.

Couldn't it be some sort of physical or mental degradation, injuries, addictions etc? Some people are more open about these, some are not. I mean he is 60 soon.

Well, someone who plays the drums in a band which I and millions of other people enjoy listening to for sure is a drummer. And a good one at that.

Listen to him in concerts: he can't keep time. In the studio (where he can use a metronome), yes, his drum parts are perfect for the song. But he's just not a good and consistent drummer, and he's gotten worse over time: it seems like he just doesn't practice.

There's even a theory that he doesn't even try to keep time, but instead leaves that to James.

No one's complaining about the style of his drum parts; if he could play them properly, no one would be complaining (aside from the sound of the snare on St. Anger).

Thought they have metronome-like things playing in their ear pieces as part of hearing their performance?

Not a musician, but I've never heard of anything like that. I would think that if every band member did that, it would end up just causing confusion. If only the drummer did it, it might work OK, but still, many songs have different tempos in different parts, so I don't think it would be a good solution. Normally, the drummer is supposed to have a very good sense of tempo and control the tempo for the whole band. But again, I'm no pro musician. I did a quick Google search and found these informative links:

https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/7s5t4b/in_ear_metron...

https://drumminginsider.com/do-drummers-use-metronomes/

He objectively sucks. He's had all the time in the world to improve his technique (to be on par with an average professional drummer) but he just doesn't care. If you listen to them live you'll immediately hear that he can't even keep the time: the most basic of tasks for the amateur drummer.

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