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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Yeah, if you're going to have 11/4, you gotta have at least one group of three in there. Like, 5/4 is usually 1-2-3 1-2. Hey Ya doesn't have a group of three. It's got a consistent snare backbeat all the way through, so it's always multiples of 2.
Great way to check is count the beats and never let yourself go up to four, and say 1 on the strong beats. Takes a few tries but you'll get to
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
Radiohead have a live piano version of Like Spinning Plates that you can recognise side-by-side but probably wouldn't be able to tell is the same otherwise.
"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.
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."
>We play live without a metronome but we record with one.
Noo whyyyyy... :( So many amateur/local bands sound so lifeless and bland on their albums, because they somehow got it into their heads that a click track should have the final say, and not their own goddamn rhythm section. Such a shame.
Playing to a click is standard for metal bands who play at high speeds. A band that sounds lifeless or bland on their albums is going to sound that way with or without it. It is standard for nearly every serious extreme metal band, with many of the pros also doing it live. There are plenty of extreme metal bands who don’t — Mayhem didn’t at least ten years ago — but it really depends on the band and the genre.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As a bass player in a noiserock improv band playing to click tracks bores the heck out of me for this reason. Pauses should be made by feeling, ideally by the whole band, not dictated by a click track that has no idea what you are doing.
Going totally controlled on a metrum has it's charm, but in my eyes (or ears, hehe) it should be the exception, not the rule.
"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.
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.
Fascinating. I obsessively listened to Metallica as a teenager, and the Justice album in particular. I know no musical theory, but I think the thing that Lars hates about that song - the tempo changes - I love.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have bone flutes with pentatonic tuning that are ~50 thousand years old. We have written records of scales, including major and minor, that are older than Ancient Greece.
And if scales are that old, then so are keys, and so are chords; no?
A young banjo player asks to jam with the old timers at the sawmill. Sure, they say, and invite him in. As they play for awhile, the youngun asks the elder picker, "Say, old man, can you even read music?" to which the elder replies, "Not enough to ruin my playin'"
I 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 ..
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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!)
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
When he talks about how things are done based on feel instead of complex subdivisions, well normal subdivisions are ultimately done based on feel as well, so there's not much difference really
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]
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica, is widely considered to a mediocre drummer, in terms of technique. His style is distinctive but cannot be called precise. The timing on Master of Puppets is likely due to a fluke during the songwriting/rehearsal process. “Hey guys, this 5/8 thing sounds really cool, I think we’re really nailing it now!”
plays it out of time
Rest of the band likely just got used to his idiosyncratic playing and adapted.
…and he did that, consistently, with only a few millisecond variations, on exactly the same beat of the same riff, for the entirety of just that one song, and in live performances?
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.
Did he do that consistently or is it just an artifact seen in a single very heavily edited record? Is the same timing seen in this section of live concert recordings during those years?
I have not been a metal head for many years but my recollection is that the live albums and bootlegs have timing that varies all over the place. Especially on MoP and Battery, and a few other notable ones (The Four Horsemen) which have complicated rhythms.
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.
With n=1, for me there is a groove or three that are just muscle memory and I'd need a longer while to sit down and think if asked write them down. They came out from noodling around and coming to "huh, that sounds cool" and I imagine that's not something particularly uncommon for other people too.
I think we lost the thread here. I wasn't suggesting Lars had millisecond-level intrinsic timing and an innovative approach to music theory. I was rejecting the idea that this beat came from incompetence. I think developing an interesting groove and being able to play it consistently in a song, and in live performances for years is evidence of drumming competence.
You don’t play music, do you?
It’s absolutely possible to learn a rhythm, groove or melody wrong, and to rehearse it until it sounds so right, the anything else sounds wrong to you. But your audience would notice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?").
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.
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.
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:
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.
This reminds me of how the timing of a pipe organ sounds distinct from the timing of piano. Presumably from the inductor-like effect of air in various volume pipes.
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.
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.
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"
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"
We listen to music with a lot of unconscious preconceived notions depending on our upbringing. Our brains enjoy grouping, repetition, structure. Also tension in the form of expectations and surprises. We can make music in free time without these patterns but to most of us it sounds less 'normal'. It's like if we make music with pitches in between the 12 notes of western tradition.
A lot of those preconceptions are to do with the stresses in a bar/measure. Things like when drums are hit or when melodies begin and progress. Misusing this leads to the same effect as stressing the wrong syllables in speech. Something like a waltz (which is 3/4) depends on stresses in a pattern of 3 beats, matching the dance. If you write a waltz as the same notes in 4/4 the patterns that should align on 3rd notes will not relate to the written form. Stresses are also why 3/4 and 6/8 are distinct - they are identical in values but the grouping of notes is not. They can also differ because the actual rhythm as played can differ from how it is written i.e. swing.
If you imagine the melody along with 'twinkle twinkle little star' and stop, it should feel unresolved because of the note it ends on. You need 'how I wonder what you are' to feel comfortable again. These two phrases should have a relation and similar grouping. It's harder to notice but within each of these phrases there's a pair of bars that have a similar relation.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe. But regardless he’s a major songwriter and the drummer on “Master of Puppets” which is, to me, the finest metal album of all time and a top rock album as well. It’s perfect. But a lot of this goes to Cliff Burton as what was accomplished on this album was quickly lost. And his influence is obvious. Just beautiful bass and backend on these songs. Just magical.
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.
Related, a lot of modern/rock guitar players learned these songs not by sheet music, but by what is colloquially known as tablature (or 'tabs') - a pared-back, fingering-based system of written musical notation which often omits timing information entirely.
It's like learning a complex dance as a set of bland, unguided position changes, and having to rely upon observation of the actual performance in order to replicate the rhythm, timing and other fine detail.
The early years/decades of the internet saw a particular boom in this style of self-learning. A state-of-affairs which means that a sizeable portion of self-taught musicians - certainly guitar and bass players - from the 90's and 00's, would navigate these, shall we call them 'rebel phrases', with a certain advantage born of unconventional learning approach. That is to say, a significant amount of playing-what-you-hear was de rigeur with the tablature-based style of learning. They never learned the traditional notation conventions in the first place, and thus had no need to break from them, in order to replicate these weird parts.
All that said, experienced players have long known that "official" music notation publications in this style of music (rock/metal) almost always require imbibing with a few grains of salt. To paraphase Dimebag Darrell, a renowned musician in this area: the extra magic, the X factor, it comes from the fine detail, the slurs and variations, the things that are by nature more difficult to define and achieve.
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.
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.
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".
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...
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...
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
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.
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."
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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".
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.
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.
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.”)
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.
I haven’t heard it, TBH I’ve been off the Metallica bus longer than some people here on HN have been alive, lol. I was one of those people who washed my hands of them when the Black Album landed. And as I’ve aged, my tastes have gotten a bit heavier, I’m a Decapitated / Nile / Dying Fetus kind of guy these days. But I’m glad to hear what you tell me, it would be nice to hear them really shine again. Perhaps I’ll give it a listen.
Yeah I saw them when they still had long hair and wasn't into anything they did after the Black album but their previous album had a couple songs that were interesting and the "72 Seasons" is a really good album I was shocked to hear after a couple listens. Especially the second half of it, there's some real gems. It's not going to be heavy like the things you're into but they thrash on it quite a bit and some of the riffs bring you back to "Kill 'Em All".
Feels like a bit of a revival for them and I'm happy they made it.
I personally kinda rather the 72 Seasons album, there are some really good songs on there IMO. It certainly works for me better than Hardwired did. The drumming is okay.
But I don't understand which parts you're saying are so technically impressive. Most of it seems pretty simple to me (not in a bad way!) and fairly easy to play. Do you have any timestamps of what you're talking about?
I'm not a full-time drummer but I saw some comments around that were questioning the better than expected for Lars timing of things and tasteful fills, etc. Could be nothing though!
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.