[HN Gopher] Microtiming in Metallica's "Master of Puppets" (2014)
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Microtiming in Metallica's "Master of Puppets" (2014)
Author : activitypea
Score : 272 points
Date : 2023-05-23 11:22 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (metalintheory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (metalintheory.com)
| pontus wrote:
| Here's a good video on this topic from a few years ago where they
| illustrate the difference between a pure 5/8 and what's actually
| on the album.
|
| https://youtu.be/dRBmavn6Wk0
| darkwater wrote:
| Well the video talks about this very article!
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I especially like the end of that video where he discusses
| trying to transcribe regular speech to music notation. It
| completes a part of my music theory mental puzzle.
|
| 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.
| chubot wrote:
| Right it's after-the-fact music ANALYSIS for certain kinds of
| music, not a predictive theory of all possible music
|
| Theory is the wrong word
| duped wrote:
| At the end of the day music theory is prescriptive, not
| predictive. That's poorly taught in high school education,
| and it's not limited to the arts.
|
| 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."
| recursive wrote:
| Disagree. Music theory should _not_ be prescriptive. It 's
| descriptive at best.
|
| 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.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| > I always thought music theory describe fundamental,
| physical truths that humans intuitively discovered.
|
| 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!)
| blitzkrieg3 wrote:
| And he references the exact blog post here. I hear it as 6/8
| (definitely a rest after the first three 16th notes which is
| born out in the timing) and I still think that's closer, but I
| appreciate the 21/32 argument and glad to see him actually try
| to find a common subdivision to those timings
| e40 wrote:
| Not the same song, but I really, really love this and it is
| Metallica:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA
|
| Larnell Lewis Hears "Enter Sandman" For The First Time (and plays
| the drum part)
| standardly wrote:
| I see some music/drummer nerds in here so I have a
| recommendation. Check out the drumming on Mound by Phish. Any
| live version (obviously). They get the audience to clap in 4/4
| and then introduce a different time signature while the claps
| continue, it's hilarious seeing people try to stay on the 4/4.
| Maybe you'd have to hear it. Also, the jam on Split Open and Melt
| is essentially in 33/32 (it's 3 bars of 8/8 and 1 bar of 9/8, but
| the snare never deviates from 4/4 time so that its relative
| placement changes every 4 bars).
|
| 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.
| mfontani wrote:
| According to a video I watched about this --
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRBmavn6Wk0 -- it's apparently
| 21/32, which is ... definitely odd.
|
| 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.
| omneity wrote:
| My feel (heh) is that's how most of metal and rock was made,
| garage-style with a 4 track tape recorder.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Maybe based on demos and sheer number of bands we've never
| heard of. This album in particular certainly was not though.
| Sweet Silence Studios was a little more state of the art...
| dagw wrote:
| In my experience most metal musicians can hold their own with
| the best of them when it comes to hard core music nerding
| with thing like idiosyncratic time signatures and unusual
| chord and key changes.
| j2bax wrote:
| Maybe your Berkeley grad metal practitioners like Dream
| Theater and probably a lot of metal in the last decade or
| two (since the internet and YouTube) but I imagine a lot of
| garage metal bands from the 70's and 80's were probably
| just playing/writing by feel and a loose understanding of
| music theory. I'm sure producers helped bring it all
| together on the album.
| dagw wrote:
| Yea, I think we can roughly split metal into pre-90s and
| post-90s, with 'modern' metal being a lot musical and
| precise. Just looking at all the people I know that have
| been in bands, the more into music theory they are, the
| more likely they are to be in a metal band.
| zaps wrote:
| Cliff was the music nerd of the group, James especially
| leaned on him to learn a lot of theory
| Jolter wrote:
| Yes, but 1986 Metallica couldn't. They took pride in
| playing Thrash Metal, not prog.
| dagw wrote:
| True. I was talking more about 'modern' metal (early 90s
| and onwards)
| ninkendo wrote:
| It's even more obvious when you consider Metallica's
| particular songwriting process at the time: James would mess
| around making cool riffs, record them into a riff track (just
| a big pile of his favorite riffs put into one big tape in no
| particular order), then he and Lars would sit down and listen
| to it, pick the best ones, and build a song around them.
|
| 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.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I didn't know this was a big revelation; we learned about this in
| music school (I used to be a semi-professional drummer back in
| the days) around 1992/93-ish.
|
| 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]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBanU-AHMqg&t=347s
| wallstprog wrote:
| King Crimson has several songs where different players are
| playing different time signatures -- check out
| https://youtu.be/GDFHtlbhqzA
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Check out Close to the Edge by Yes
|
| [1] Analysis -
| https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/11599/what-is-the-...
|
| [2] Live Performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDU-
| vilgic
| [deleted]
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Awesome!
|
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| But... do you play it all using downstrokes?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Of course. What else would I practice downstrokes for since
| puberty?
| osigurdson wrote:
| Good to hear. I have an unpopular opinion that it actually
| doesn't matter that much. I don't like how they play this
| live, only playing the E string with light downstrokes. It
| sounds much better in my opinion to play the full 5th.
| There are other songs where downstrokes make a lot of
| difference but not this one imo. I expect many down votes
| for this opinion on downstrokes but prefer not to "live on
| my knees, conformity".
| bheadmaster wrote:
| I agree, I always use my index finger to press the second
| fret to get that E 5th for the palm mute, then use middle
| finger and pinky to do the G-A-A#-A 5ths.
|
| 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...
| randombits0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| th3h4mm3r wrote:
| [flagged]
| oriolid wrote:
| It would be interesting to know where the transcription with 5/8
| originally came from. If you listen to the record, it's not clear
| what it is and if it was ever supposed to have a nice written
| form, but it certainly doesn't fit in with the sequence of even
| length 8th notes.
| gooseyard wrote:
| a big part of my jazz education was transcribing solos and then
| comparing them to other students transcriptions of the same piece
| with an instructor. it's an interesting process because there is
| almost always variation in the way players notate sections when
| the time or the harmony gets tricky.
|
| 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.
| kortex wrote:
| Reminds me of Aksak rhythms in Middle Eastern / Mediterranean
| traditions. If you try to translate it to Western schemas, it is
| roughly 9/8. But that's not really correct, as that would imply 9
| evenly spaced notes, with an emphasis on every 3 notes, or maybe
| a 4+5, or something like that. It's closer if you break it down
| like 2+2+2+3 (baka baka baka bakata), but that's _also_ not quite
| right if you actually feel the flow. It 's also not exactly the
| same duration eights. It really feels like a free flowing pulse
| (at whatever the 4/4 tempo would be), with a hiccup, almost like
| 4.333/4.
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksak
| Applejinx wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm listening to it right now and that section always
| stood out to me as a specific rhythm thing they did. It's a GREAT
| example of Metallica shoving the beat around anyway they wanted,
| with Lars driving it (doesn't matter what the guitars want to do,
| if Lars doesn't reinforce it they won't be able to do that)
|
| 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...
| munificent wrote:
| Since I make electronic music, I am _very_ dialed in to swing,
| triplets, and schaffel rhythms. I just listened to MMMBop and I
| 'm not hearing anything interesting going on. The drums are
| fairly unswung and the vocals are a little jazzy and swung. But
| I don't hear any explicit triplets on top of 4/4 action or
| anything. What am I missing?
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >implies that Hanson, if they wanted, could do Master Of
| Puppets properly
|
| 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.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Another very good band that got famous from a song that is
| obviously way more poppy than their other excellent music:
| Jimmy Eat World. Check out their two albums before _Bleed
| American_ : _Clarity_ and _Static Prevails_ , or even just
| tracks off _Bleed American_ that are not _The Middle_ . You
| can really hear the influence from bands like Sunny Day Real
| Estate, Boys Life, and all the others that they released
| splits with:
|
| - 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_
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Is that what happens when the song pace changes in Franz
| Ferdinand's "Take Me Out"?
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Take Me Out is just a simple ritardando that stays at 4/4.
| The drums switch up to a disco beat. The song is unusual
| because a slowdown that early in the song usually kills
| energy but it somehow adds energy to this one.
| munificent wrote:
| No, "Take Me Out" just does a large global tempo change
| partway through the song.
| CPLX wrote:
| Ambiguity between straight-eights and triplet-eights is the
| core of a huge swath of jazz and blues derived music. It's
| called swing and it's basically the rhythmic equivalent of the
| blue third, where the ambiguity is the point.
|
| It's beyond common, not something Hanson would be singled out
| for.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Several of you missed the point. It's Metallica that's doing
| swing. Hanson isn't doing swing or ambiguity in Mmmbop.
| They're overlaying TIGHT triplets over other stuff that
| implies straight sixteenths. Not ambiguous at all, they nail
| it.
| default-kramer wrote:
| Hanson might indeed be doing triplets; it's too hard for me
| to tell without doing the Audacity legwork. (Although it
| sounds like straight 16ths to me.) But in any case,
| Metallica is definitely not doing swing here.
| Lewton wrote:
| What you're describing Hanson doing is literally just "swing",
| a basic rhythmic concept
|
| It's not really analogous to what's going on in master of
| puppets
| smcameron wrote:
| Speaking of swing, Eddie Van Halen would swing fast rhythm
| stuff that on casual listen would appear to be straight 16th
| notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GJO2SovRgU&t=12m42s
| raverbashing wrote:
| For another song with confusing timing, look up the beginning
| of 'Message in a Bottle' (The Police)
| varlen wrote:
| I love how the drum grooves match the content of the verses.
| The first verse is a introduction to the state of the
| protagonist and there's mainly a kick drum in the 3rd beat,
| keeping it simple and personal. Second verse: lyrics goes
| deep into the protagonist and their lack of hope/anxiety
| while from the drum side the kick drum appears in all 4
| beats, toms reensemble the human heart beat and there's no
| snare. Third-verse concludes the story bringing a sense of
| expansion to the world of the protagonist: From the drums
| perspective, still kick drum in the 4 beats but the snare is
| back and there's way more hi-hat/ride, matching the same
| sense of expansion of the protagonist world and the "return
| of hope". It feels like the drums weren't just played to
| sound cool but crafted to tell a story.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I think its more that the drum riff bounces all over the
| place. its not a straight 4/4 beat. There are displacements
| and all sorts of fun things in there
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The whole song is 4/4.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| There are many The Police and Sting songs with interesting
| timing changes. Sometimes it will maintain a steady 4/4 but
| the phrases will contain differing numbers of measures.
| ssharp wrote:
| Stewart Copeland's drumming is also very syncopated and he
| won't stay on a backbeat very long, if at all. Plus, in
| addition to actual time changes, he can play over/under the
| bar, implying a time change while actually staying in
| original time.
|
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I wad genuinely surprised the title track on Dream of the
| Blue Turtles was all 4/4 - it does change between swung and
| straight though.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Maybe not so weird for 2014 but if you wrote this article today
| it's super weird to try and analyze it in audacity with fractions
| of a second.
|
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| No way the guys in Metallica ever thought about doing a measure
| in 5/8 time, it's all by feel. Side note, Master of Puppets is
| one of the best metal albums of all time, and I was fortunate
| enough to see them on this tour with Cliff Burton before he
| passed.
| zokier wrote:
| Its kinda embarrassing, but I have no idea how all this rythm
| stuff works in music. I mean I get the basics of the notation,
| but I don't understand the idea of dividing music into small
| chunks. That is to say that to me you could do away with the time
| signature numerology and bar lines in sheet music and it'd be all
| the same. And indeed you can make music like that, notably Satie
| composed music in "free time"[1].
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_time_(music)
| rolfea wrote:
| When I was tutoring music theory, some students who had a
| similar experience had "aha" moments when we tried to focus
| more on how the harmony of a piece of music is linked to the
| meter.
|
| 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"
| zokier wrote:
| You are right, I'm not very good with harmonic changes
| either, or functional harmony in general.
|
| > 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"
| smitelli wrote:
| For straight-timed pop music, think about it like the markings
| on a ruler. Everything is based on a doubling or halving of
| something else.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z0T_fop-mI
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| I love things like this. It's especially funny knowing about Lars
| reputation as a drummer. Things like this are found throughout
| the early Metallica tab/notation books. I have a good friend who
| recently did a set of And Justice for All songs who encountered
| it and told me at the time. "That's definitely not what they
| actually played," all over the album.
|
| 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.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| Was in a black metal band and there was this one riff we had a
| problem syncing up at the end for the transition to the next.
| Sometimes we'd nail it, other times it fell apart. Turned out
| that, while the drum beat was 4/4, the first riff was not. We
| just hadn't noticed. Once we figured that out, we hit it every
| time and it was glorious.
| karlgrz wrote:
| I know this pain and joy feeling, too!
|
| "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 :-)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I was in my music theory class in high school trying to
| transcribe 3 or 4 bars I played on the keyboard into the midi
| software. I couldn't get it and so I called the teacher over
| who was a long time conductor. He tried for the rest of class
| and couldn't get it. It was simple and in rhythm, but just not
| something that fit into any notation. There are many "groove
| window" combination of swing, articulation, syncopation and
| time that there's not always a straightforward notation for.
| Really that style of notation is an attempt to bend the music
| to classical rules that it doesn't align with. I wonder if this
| will be lost as music gets less personal in production.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I mean classical music you follow the conductor, even as they
| bend the time faster or slower, or take unmarked pauses.
|
| 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| I'll add that any time you care about a song, you should
| probably be doing your own transcriptions. I've seen so many
| different problems with so many different transcriptions of
| songs.
|
| If you make your own transcription, it may not be more
| accurate, but at least it will be your version of the song.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Amusingly enough, I've seen a couple videos of Metallica live
| where they're playing songs way faster than the album version,
| like the 1989 Seattle show https://youtu.be/kbyGHDMPA7E
| lancesells wrote:
| Adrenaline and give and take of the energy of the crowd. For
| someone like Metallica nowadays it might also be making sure
| you get through the setlist before the cost of the venue and
| staff doubles.
| RyJones wrote:
| Common thing for performers - they play faster on stage
| unless they're really disciplined (using a click track for
| timing or similar)
| m463 wrote:
| sounds like, everyone.
|
| 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?
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| This era of Metallica was the greatest metal band that ever
| did or will exist.
| sophacles wrote:
| The youtube channel 12tone did an analysis of "7 nation army"
| that spends quite a while talking about the baseline "triplet"
| in a similar way the op article. Not the same genre, but an
| interesting analysis that touches on these concepts:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeytZ8qvbTk
| golergka wrote:
| Couldn't you just re-trigger the click with some MIDI control?
| larrydag wrote:
| Apparently due to these timing challenges in that album Lars
| Ulrich does not like playing Eye of the Beholder live.
|
| https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/lars-ulrich-hates-metallica-tra...
| mkw2000 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of anything that's very Suffocation, I'd love to
| listen
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| This particular song won't be recorded until later this year
| but the last album is easy to find online. Glorious Depravity
| - "Ageless Violence". It's influenced by 90s American death
| metal in general, I'm not sure you'll get a big Suffo vibe
| throughout but there are moments.
| Semaphor wrote:
| For the lazy:
| https://gloriousdepravity.bandcamp.com/album/ageless-
| violenc...
|
| Sounds pretty sweet.
| jcpst wrote:
| One of the members is from Pyrrhon, which I've been a fan
| of for a long time. Legit. This is on my wishlist now.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| He will be glad to hear that! You should check out his
| _other_ other band if you haven 't already, Weeping
| Sores. Dramatic doom/death.
| https://weepingsores.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-sores
| jcpst wrote:
| Yes, I am down with this.
|
| 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.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| That's really cool! And it's a small world. I've known
| Colin and the Krallice guys for years! Everyone in
| Glorious Depravity is a software developer and in other
| bands, there's a good chance that you crossed paths with
| some of us at some point.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me this gem is still sitting in my
| Bandcamp wish list.
| ilamont wrote:
| There was a recent interview with Chi Moreno of the Deftones
| (it might have been on Song Exploder) where he said they did
| away with the click track on some of the recordings for Ohms
| and it made things go much more smoothly. I think there was a
| comment along the lines of "we let the drummer be a drummer."
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" 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."_
|
| 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.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| My stuff is generally stupid enough that we can do it the
| simple and primitive way. One of the perks of playing certain
| kinds of extreme metal!
| cyxxon wrote:
| I distinctly remember that I had some transcription of songs
| from the ...and Justice For All album that were in a special
| edition of some guitar magazine from the nineties, and they
| seemed to be really on point. Later I bought the full official
| transcription book, and boy was that a letdown. Completely
| different transcriptions that in parts didn't even make sense
| (IIRC, I haven't checked in a while).
|
| 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".
| jcastro wrote:
| There's rough rhythm-only cuts of Justice on music services
| (I think they were on the last reissue) and it's like
| listening to an entirely new dimension of those songs. I
| don't play guitar but my friend does and he was like "none of
| what we just heard was in that transcription book we had in
| high school." Heh.
| jdwithit wrote:
| I've seen interviews with musicians where they're asked a
| relatively simple question about the key a song is in or
| what's going on in a given riff from a music theory
| perspective, and the response is like "I don't even know what
| that means man I just play what comes to me". It's definitely
| not a given that a band would be able to transcribe their own
| songs, or tell that someone else did it correctly, even if
| they wanted to. Some people seem to just have an intuitive
| feel for playing music, which I envy.
| mikeryan wrote:
| While I think the matter has more recently settled it there was
| a time where folks thought that Outkast's "Hey Ya" was in 11/4.
|
| 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...
| chubot wrote:
| Ha that's great, I always wondered about that song.
|
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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 ?
| gmueckl wrote:
| I don't think that this is a matter of definition. The song
| rhythm is clearly audible. The kick drum is a dead
| giveaway. On a 4/4 bar the kick drum has two additional
| quieter hits after the 3 and before the snare on 4, which
| de-emphasize the 3 and 4 in those bars. The 2/4 bar just
| plays the simpler kick/snare pattern from the first half of
| the 4/4 bar and that pattern repeats immediately in the
| next 4/4 bar.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah I hear that, if you focus on the kick. There's
| certainly a 4, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4 pattern.
|
| 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
| gmueckl wrote:
| First up, I'm more used to classical music (piano,
| recently more synths).
|
| 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.
| padjo wrote:
| 4/4 would probably indicate a large stress on the one and
| smaller one on the three of each bar.
|
| 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
| chubot wrote:
| I just listened to Hey Ya again -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgvGjAhvIw
|
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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 :)
|
| ---
|
| 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!
| padjo wrote:
| I dunno I clearly hear a four beat in the drums! Feels
| really natural to count 4 anyway until you run into that
| bar of 2.
|
| The map's not the territory though
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah I was focusing on the snare, which seems to give the
| song a lot of its feel
|
| But there is a reptition of 4 in the kick, a very common
| beat of o . ! o . o ! .
|
| Agreed, I would guess the concept of having a time
| signature is to make musical notation easy to write, and
| convenient for performers
|
| But it's not necessarily reality
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| That means that 'Hey Ya' has the same time signature as 'Say
| a Little Prayer'!
| tohnjitor wrote:
| I remember trying to program tempo accelerations and
| decelerations for my old band's album. It was something that
| the band did intuitively but it was maddening to try to
| recreate on a grid.
| timc3 wrote:
| "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."
|
| 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.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| We talked about it and decided it wasn't worth it at the
| time. This is early in the pre-production phase so it's
| totally possible that we'll invest more time after we've
| rehearsed to it for a few weeks.
| sklivvz1971 wrote:
| It's what the "groove" of a riff is made of -- together with the
| micro changes in palm muting, the way the pick is held and
| used... these make up the Metallica sound the way it is.
|
| 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...
| RajT88 wrote:
| This comment thread is filled with all the things I love about
| Metallica posts:
|
| - People discussing their love for the music
|
| - Geeking out about Metallica's songwriting, and playing in
| general
|
| - Trashing Lars
| nemo44x wrote:
| > - 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Yeah, the way the band tells it, he got nervous on stage and
| just kept playing faster and faster, and accidentally
| invented Thrash Metal.
|
| All the good will he burned up with Napster I think he never
| recovered from in the eyes of fans.
| smitty1e wrote:
| This is the sort of thing that one doubts a *GPT system will ever
| produce creatively.
|
| Advantage, humans.
| dwringer wrote:
| Looking at those time durations it is tempting to interpret this
| as switching to where the sixteenth note triplet becomes the new
| beat for a bar, which has 16 beats in it. Thus the downbeat gets
| shifted 2/3 of a beat when returning to the original meter.
| De_Delph wrote:
| So it turns out Ulrich is not a terrible drummer at all!
| uguuo_o wrote:
| I think he is still a terrible drummer. Hs style, whole
| somewhat unique, lacks technique by a whole lot. As a drummer,
| Metallica's songs are pretty easy to play even for intermediary
| players. There are far better drummers, one of my favorites
| being Priester: https://youtu.be/rZCm1Kz1PVY
| Dah00n wrote:
| This has been discussed to death, but I'll just add that in
| my opinion this is like saying one painting is worse than
| another painting because of the technique of the painter.
| Never mind that one was sold for $10 million and the other
| for $100. Sure you can rate something on technique but
| outside academia hardly anyone does. It is not like most
| people buy albums based off how good technique the musicians
| have and after all the better entertainer is the one who
| entertains the best.
|
| 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".
| otherme123 wrote:
| I don't like to mix popularity with ability or capability.
| Lars as entertainer, or even song writter? 10 out of 10.
| Lars as a drummer? Meh, at best. Any good drummer is
| entitled to wrinkle the nose when he has to read "Lars is a
| top drummer", when they really mean "I like Metallica a
| lot, and their drummer is called Lars".
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| When it comes to any kind of art, beauty is entirely in the
| eye of the beholder. I love some music with really complex
| harmonies and rhythms like jazz or progressive rock, but
| also love a lot of EDM made with simple 808 beats and the
| simplest melodies.
|
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| He's not very technically strong, and a lot of their songs
| are very easy to play.
|
| 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.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| I think this is really the key. "Metallica was a great
| band, and they had a drummer named Lars" is a perfectly
| reasonable take. He did what was needed for the songs, most
| of the time. If people want to extrapolate from that take
| to "and therefore he's a great drummer," that's a bit more
| of a stretch. He's not known for being a technical guy like
| Peart or Kollias or Adler. And we know he can't play songs
| like "Dyer's Eve" in one take, live, when I could go to a
| local death metal show, wave my arms around and hit three
| sixteen-year-old kids who could do it cold. Supposedly he
| couldn't even do it in one take in the studio. But he puts
| the drums where they need to be. He can do enough of the
| standard "heavy drumming" to get by ("One"), but he can't
| really push it too far ("Dyer's Eve", "Damage Inc.")
| nemo44x wrote:
| What do you think of his drumming on their latest album
| "72 Seasons"? I'd say it's some of his best ever not only
| stylistically but technically. I've heard some people
| believe that it could potentially be a machine playing
| parts as they're almost too crisp and technical for him
| at this age.
|
| An aside, I think their latest album is actually really
| good. Shockingly good overall. Their last album had a
| couple good tracks but the new album is easily their best
| since AJFA.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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".
| MrScruff wrote:
| 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.
| balfirevic wrote:
| 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.
| MrScruff wrote:
| Haha that's a cool fact. By implication you'll hear a
| slightly different groove as the drummer than your
| audience.
| YVoyiatzis wrote:
| The closest a human can arrive to AI drumming levels is Tomas
| Haake of _Meshuggah_.
| [Reference](https://youtu.be/bAJ1WTGNISk).
| hotsauceror wrote:
| 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.
| urxvtcd wrote:
| 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.
| zoltar wrote:
| I find this video (series) helps break down Bleed pretty
| nicely:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcsAAPdJTBE
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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/
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| Jolter wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| ...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?
| colanderman wrote:
| As a musician, I do not find this surprising at all. It's
| easy to internalize "incorrect" rhythms and pitches.
| LeonB wrote:
| "practice makes permanent"
| IsTom wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| IsTom wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| _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?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _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.
| colanderman wrote:
| 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...
| holri wrote:
| Great musicians vary the timing and other parameters according
| to the live situation / mood / acoustics / audience. It is
| never the same.
| ca_tech wrote:
| 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
| mynegation wrote:
| (1) Should have (2014) in the title. (2) Youtube video mentioned
| in few comments actually refers to the blog entry posted.
| jredwards wrote:
| I think the comments are the most revealing. It's not that it's
| in a 5/8 with some odd microtiming, but that it's some kind of
| additive rhythm:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_rhythm_and_divisive_r...
|
| 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."
| pseudosaid wrote:
| the click track is where music goes to die.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| I'm afraid the truth is more boring: it's just a slightly
| misplayed 3/4 bar. It occurs during the guitar solo section and
| is actually very clearly 3/4 there. During the verses they just
| play it a little faster, probably because they weren't actually
| fully aware that they were turning it into a 3/4 bar, they just
| found a riff they liked and played it slightly faster because it
| sounded cool. That's really it.
| mkjonesuk wrote:
| "If you don't have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band."
|
| - Buddy Rich
| eigenvalue wrote:
| If you like this, you might be interested in hearing "micro
| articulations" in baroque harpsichord music. The most talented
| harpsichordists, like Scott Ross (RIP), use incredibly minute
| pauses and lags to add expression to the music, which is
| otherwise hard to do with a harpsichord, since it does not allow
| for dynamics like a piano-- the string on the harpsichord either
| gets plucked or it doesn't, whereas the piano hammer can hit with
| varying intensity based on how hard the key is pressed. A good
| example:
|
| 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.
| visualphoenix wrote:
| While I'm unsure if this was true of Master of Puppets, I recall
| hearing an anecdote about And Justice For All...
|
| 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.
| camgunz wrote:
| I doubt this for 2 reasons:
|
| - 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.
| visualphoenix wrote:
| Might sound incredible, but I have no reason to doubt my
| source: my father mixed AJFA.
| vodou wrote:
| Can you please ask him why he removed Jason's bass guitar!
| (Sorry, I had to.)
| visualphoenix wrote:
| My dad's ex-partner tells his version of a story about
| it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFgeFh2nlw
|
| Tldr: band was mourning cliff's death and giving newsted
| grief.
| luckydata wrote:
| that's a bs story made up to shit on Lars
| [deleted]
| visualphoenix wrote:
| Lars is an incredible drummer.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I am pretty sure the guys were not sitting down and doing all
| this theory when making the song.
|
| They found something that kicked ass and worked and went with it.
| Or they just sort of lucked out with errors that worked well.
| [deleted]
| code_duck wrote:
| I would just like to recognize Wolf Marshall. We thought he was
| some sort of joke in middle school, but in retrospect, the guy
| taught us so much about guitar by being the transcriber for so
| many metal albums. I would think he must have a very interesting
| life story.
| gjulianm wrote:
| I think that another example of Metallica doing "whatever" with
| the timing is just in the previous song in the album, Battery. If
| you try to follow the beat, it mostly follows a 4/4 but sometimes
| they just cut it short. I feel it's more accentuated in Battery,
| because it's a little bit more random and contributes to the
| rushed feeling of the song.
| nanny wrote:
| Assuming you're talking about the "chorus" where the lyrics are
| "Battery --- Ba-ter-ry!":
|
| "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?").
| gjulianm wrote:
| Not really the chorus, but mostly the instrumental part at
| the beginning (after the, let's say, acoustic-slow part). I
| think there's some short timings there too.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Likewise with a lot of System of a Down's music; most of it
| _sounds_ like a straight 4 /4 but it often feels quite clipped
| at the end of a measure. Their song Question [0] is a great
| example of this feel, it's like one-a-two-a-threefour.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UIca3rups
| Nbadal wrote:
| This is just an example of poor transcription. The "odd" bar is
| 11/16, with a rhythm of: 8th-8th-8th-16th-8th-8th where the 16th
| note is a rest
| pkulak wrote:
| I love it. This is the kind of thing we lose by moving to
| electronic-only music. Not ragging on electronic, but sometimes
| you just need a bunch of human beings getting together and doing
| what sounds awesome to them, even if it becomes nearly impossible
| to transcribe later (I guess, in this case, that measure would be
| 21/32, which... no thank you).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| So the hypothesis about this from the traditional metalheads I
| know including myself, at least since the late 90s has been: Lars
| isn't a consistent drummer and Metallica aren't particularly
| "tight" of a band.
|
| 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.
| Demiurge wrote:
| If this this just Lars fault, and the band is not tight, how do
| you explain the consistency of the delay each time the riff is
| played? How likely do you think this is, statistically
| speaking?
| visualphoenix wrote:
| If it's true that Flemming Rasmussen hand edited every beat
| of the drum track, that explains the statistics and
| consistency.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Back in the pre-digital era that this was recorded in, I
| think this would have been impractical.
|
| 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.
| gopher_space wrote:
| It'd be interesting to find out how many times they
| practiced that song before recording it. It's hard to
| overstate how much time and attention people had before
| ubiquitous cell phones and internet.
| mikeryan wrote:
| IIRC those rumors were post Flemming and started in the Bob
| Rock era.
|
| 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 ...
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Well there two different Larses. There's the young driven,
| actually trying Lars of the 80s. He was great, AJFA was
| pretty ahead of its time as far as metal drumming goes.
|
| 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.
| colanderman wrote:
| It's very easy to consistently play a rhythm incorrectly. I
| have done and heard this many times as a musician.
| luckydata wrote:
| in this case he's the author of the music so whatever he
| plays is correct
| PeterisP wrote:
| How do you define "incorrectly"? IMHO the author of the
| song consistently plays it one way, then that's the correct
| execution of that rhythm, and playing it differently would
| be a different rhythm, not the one intended.
| colanderman wrote:
| I should have used scare quotes. "In a way which someone
| other than the performer may call incorrect." Which is
| the case here.
|
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I'd say that playing from notation and notating what's
| played are two very different things - in the latter, any
| difference between notation and execution means that it's
| the notation that is inaccurate; and in this particular
| case (as with quite a few others) the traditional
| notation system is too limited to properly notate this
| part of the song, as that 5/8 measure is the closest
| thing that can be reasonably written, but it's wrong
| because that part of the song is not _really_ 5 /8 but
| something like 5.3/8 ..
| CPLX wrote:
| Any theory stating that Lars sucks at playing drums has an
| unstated premise that there's some other core purpose to
| playing drums more important than creating music that people
| find enjoyable.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| I don't enjoy Metallica because their playing is sloppy and
| their rhythm is bad. It might be part of the cause is that
| they aren't as good musicians as their fans think. It might
| just be that I don't like them.
| danparsonson wrote:
| See also the theme tune to the first Terminator film, which has a
| really strange signature, and the theme tune to the Transformers
| cartoon from the 80s, which has a weird break in the middle of
| it: https://youtu.be/4Lk1d1PbHYY
| misthop wrote:
| The Transformers song almost certainly doesn't have that weird
| break as written. The Youtuber spends 18 minutes trying to
| figure out the music for what is most likely a production
| artifact - the recorded music didn't line up with the animation
| beats, so they did a hard cut on the audio track to make it
| fit.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| An added point about this (and other similar weird) timing is
| that they have essentially gone extinct at this point
|
| 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
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| [flagged]
| selcuka wrote:
| "Reader View" is your friend.
| frou_dh wrote:
| It's against the HN guidelines to moan about the format of the
| site/article: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| De_Delph wrote:
| Ironically your reply is in light gray text
| tibbon wrote:
| I think rhythmic quirks like this are interesting. Sadly, most
| music today is over-edited to a click for machine-like
| perfection. Producers and engineers now are quick to snap
| anything that's "near" a 4/4 timing to a grid and cut off any
| extra bits. There's artists that deviate from this, but even
| great drummers like Jimmy Chamberlin are now being smashed onto a
| grid for the sake of tightness and expediency.
| [deleted]
| ehutch79 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| andjd wrote:
| 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.
| luckydata wrote:
| music theory is not for writing music, it's for understanding
| it.
| [deleted]
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| rolfea wrote:
| 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.
| camgunz wrote:
| 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.
| nstart wrote:
| 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 :,)
| lancesells wrote:
| 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.
| strunz wrote:
| 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.
| xzel wrote:
| 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.
| influx wrote:
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| 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.
| datpiff wrote:
| > 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
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| 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?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 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).
| CSMastermind wrote:
| 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.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| 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.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| 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.
| roflyear wrote:
| My understanding is for a lot of punk at least, they played
| what they could play fast, and what sounded all right,
| yeah?
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Yeah pretty much. All you need is a power chord to get
| started.
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| riceart wrote:
| Example?
| ehutch79 wrote:
| 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.
| civilized wrote:
| Very cool. It's about the measure, repeated several times in each
| verse, that sounds like it not only skips a beat, but lurches
| awkwardly (and excitingly).
|
| 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.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| yeah, this is what i thought after reading and then listening
| it, but then I tried to count and now I would say it's 11/16 -
| with three eighth notes, a sixteenth pause and two eighth
| notes. This sixteenth pause hints the required rush, because if
| this was an eighth pause it would be too slow and too even...
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