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.
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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.
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.