22 ms·

Microtiming in Metallica's “Master of Puppets” (2014)

324 points by activitypea 3y ago

civilized 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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...
pontus 3y ago
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 https://youtu.be/dRBmavn6Wk0
- darkwater 3y ago
  Well the video talks about this very article!
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  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.
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    > 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!)
  - duped 3y ago
    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."
mfontani 3y ago
According to a video I watched about this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRBmavn6Wk0 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 3y ago
  My feel (heh) is that’s how most of metal and rock was made, garage-style with a 4 track tape recorder.
  - dagw 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        Cliff was the music nerd of the group, James especially leaned on him to learn a lot of theory
bheadmaster 3y ago
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 3y ago
  But... do you play it all using downstrokes?
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    Of course. What else would I practice downstrokes for since puberty?
    - osigurdson 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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...
matsemann 3y ago
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".
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  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/ https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/unodrum/
  - matsemann 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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.
mynegation 3y ago
(1) Should have (2014) in the title. (2) Youtube video mentioned in few comments actually refers to the blog entry posted.
gjulianm 3y ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UIca3rups
- nanny 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
sidewndr46 3y ago
[flagged]
- selcuka 3y ago
  "Reader View" is your friend.
- frou_dh 3y ago
  It's against the HN guidelines to moan about the format of the site/article: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- De_Delph 3y ago
  Ironically your reply is in light gray text
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Applejinx 3y ago
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…
- Lewton 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GJO2SovRgU&t=12m42s
- raverbashing 3y ago
  For another song with confusing timing, look up the beginning of 'Message in a Bottle' (The Police)
  - tohnjitor 3y ago
oriolid 3y ago
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.
De_Delph 3y ago
So it turns out Ulrich is not a terrible drummer at all!
- uguuo_o 3y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/rZCm1Kz1PVY
  - mort96 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.”)
danparsonson 3y ago
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 https://youtu.be/4Lk1d1PbHYY
- misthop 3y ago
  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.
thatwasunusual 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBanU-AHMqg&t=347s
visualphoenix 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Might sound incredible, but I have no reason to doubt my source: my father mixed AJFA.
    - vodou 3y ago
      Can you please ask him why he removed Jason's bass guitar! (Sorry, I had to.)
      - visualphoenix 3y ago
        My dad’s ex-partner tells his version of a story about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFgeFh2nlw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFgeFh2nlw Tldr: band was mourning cliff’s death and giving newsted grief.
- luckydata 3y ago
  that's a bs story made up to shit on Lars
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    If it’s true that Flemming Rasmussen hand edited every beat of the drum track, that explains the statistics and consistency.
    - CWuestefeld 3y ago
      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.
    - mikeryan 3y ago
      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 ...
    - gopher_space 3y ago
sickcodebruh 3y ago
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.
- tohnjitor 3y ago
  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.
- cyxxon 3y ago
  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".
ben7799 3y ago
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.
sklivvz1971 3y ago
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...
TaupeRanger 3y ago
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.
Scandiravian 3y ago
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
ehutch79 3y ago
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 3y ago
  [deleted]
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > 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).
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    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.
    - roflyear 3y ago
      My understanding is for a lot of punk at least, they played what they could play fast, and what sounded all right, yeah?
      - ehutch79 3y ago
        Yeah pretty much. All you need is a power chord to get started.
zokier 3y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_time_(music)
- rolfea 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
tibbon 3y ago
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.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
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 3y ago
  [deleted]
RajT88 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > - 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 3y ago
    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.
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      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.
    - laratied 3y ago
      [flagged]
jredwards 3y ago
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_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."
randombits0 3y ago
[flagged]
eigenvalue 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQp_QIzd7w and playing my favorite, Scarlatti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQm8I8EXZf8 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.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  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.
pkulak 3y ago
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).
gooseyard 3y ago
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.
standardly 3y ago
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.
th3h4mm3r 3y ago
[flagged]
pseudosaid 3y ago
the click track is where music goes to die.
e40 3y ago
Not the same song, but I really, really love this and it is Metallica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA Larnell Lewis Hears "Enter Sandman" For The First Time (and plays the drum part)
kortex 3y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksak
Nbadal 3y ago
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
wallstprog 3y ago
King Crimson has several songs where different players are playing different time signatures -- check out https://youtu.be/GDFHtlbhqzA https://youtu.be/GDFHtlbhqzA
- stevenjgarner 3y ago
  Check out Close to the Edge by Yes [1] Analysis - https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/11599/what-is-the-time-signature-and-tempo-lets-say-for-the-intro-of-yes-close-to https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/11599/what-is-the-... [2] Live Performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDU-vilgic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDU-vilgic
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mkjonesuk 3y ago
“If you don't have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band.” - Buddy Rich
dwringer 3y ago
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.
smitty1e 3y ago
This is the sort of thing that one doubts a *GPT system will ever produce creatively. Advantage, humans.
code_duck 3y ago
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.
vondur 3y ago
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.
crtified 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
udev 3y ago
In my opinion Metallica's Eye of the Beholder produces an even more powerful effect with unusual timing. See the first minute of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEBp9ulELLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEBp9ulELLA If you have good speakers, the effect can almost feel like the source of the sound is rotating around you.
- ideamotor 3y ago
  I’m not a big metallica fan but that album is great, especially the first part of that song, as you said.

324 points by activitypea 3y ago

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 3y ago
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...

pontus 3y ago

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 https://youtu.be/dRBmavn6Wk0

darkwater 3y ago
Well the video talks about this very article!
Hnrobert42 3y ago
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.
- epiccoleman 3y ago
  > 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!)
- duped 3y ago
  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."

mfontani 3y ago

According to a video I watched about this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRBmavn6Wk0 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 3y ago
My feel (heh) is that’s how most of metal and rock was made, garage-style with a 4 track tape recorder.
- dagw 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      Cliff was the music nerd of the group, James especially leaned on him to learn a lot of theory

bheadmaster 3y ago

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 3y ago
But... do you play it all using downstrokes?
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  Of course. What else would I practice downstrokes for since puberty?
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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...

matsemann 3y ago

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".

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
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/ https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/unodrum/
- matsemann 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.

mynegation 3y ago

(1) Should have (2014) in the title. (2) Youtube video mentioned in few comments actually refers to the blog entry posted.

gjulianm 3y ago

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.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UIca3rups
nanny 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.

sidewndr46 3y ago

[flagged]

selcuka 3y ago
"Reader View" is your friend.
frou_dh 3y ago
It's against the HN guidelines to moan about the format of the site/article: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
De_Delph 3y ago
Ironically your reply is in light gray text

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Applejinx 3y ago

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…

Lewton 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GJO2SovRgU&t=12m42s
raverbashing 3y ago
For another song with confusing timing, look up the beginning of 'Message in a Bottle' (The Police)
- tohnjitor 3y ago

oriolid 3y ago

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.

De_Delph 3y ago

So it turns out Ulrich is not a terrible drummer at all!

uguuo_o 3y ago
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 https://youtu.be/rZCm1Kz1PVY
- mort96 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.”)

danparsonson 3y ago

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 https://youtu.be/4Lk1d1PbHYY

misthop 3y ago
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.

thatwasunusual 3y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBanU-AHMqg&t=347s

visualphoenix 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Might sound incredible, but I have no reason to doubt my source: my father mixed AJFA.
  - vodou 3y ago
    Can you please ask him why he removed Jason's bass guitar! (Sorry, I had to.)
    - visualphoenix 3y ago
      My dad’s ex-partner tells his version of a story about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFgeFh2nlw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFgeFh2nlw Tldr: band was mourning cliff’s death and giving newsted grief.
luckydata 3y ago
that's a bs story made up to shit on Lars

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  If it’s true that Flemming Rasmussen hand edited every beat of the drum track, that explains the statistics and consistency.
  - CWuestefeld 3y ago
    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.
  - mikeryan 3y ago
    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 ...
  - gopher_space 3y ago

sickcodebruh 3y ago

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.

tohnjitor 3y ago
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.
cyxxon 3y ago
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".

ben7799 3y ago

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.

sklivvz1971 3y ago

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...

TaupeRanger 3y ago

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.

Scandiravian 3y ago

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

ehutch79 3y ago

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 3y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 3y ago
> 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).
- ehutch79 3y ago
  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.
  - roflyear 3y ago
    My understanding is for a lot of punk at least, they played what they could play fast, and what sounded all right, yeah?
    - ehutch79 3y ago
      Yeah pretty much. All you need is a power chord to get started.

zokier 3y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_time_(music)

rolfea 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago

tibbon 3y ago

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.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

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 3y ago
[deleted]

RajT88 3y ago

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 3y ago
> - 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 3y ago
  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.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    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.
  - laratied 3y ago
    [flagged]

jredwards 3y ago

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_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."

randombits0 3y ago

[flagged]

eigenvalue 3y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQp_QIzd7w and playing my favorite, Scarlatti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQm8I8EXZf8 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.

devnullbrain 3y ago
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.

pkulak 3y ago

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).

gooseyard 3y ago

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.

standardly 3y ago

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.

th3h4mm3r 3y ago

[flagged]

pseudosaid 3y ago

the click track is where music goes to die.

e40 3y ago

Not the same song, but I really, really love this and it is Metallica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA Larnell Lewis Hears "Enter Sandman" For The First Time (and plays the drum part)

kortex 3y ago

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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksak

Nbadal 3y ago

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

wallstprog 3y ago

King Crimson has several songs where different players are playing different time signatures -- check out https://youtu.be/GDFHtlbhqzA https://youtu.be/GDFHtlbhqzA

stevenjgarner 3y ago
Check out Close to the Edge by Yes [1] Analysis - https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/11599/what-is-the-time-signature-and-tempo-lets-say-for-the-intro-of-yes-close-to https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/11599/what-is-the-... [2] Live Performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDU-vilgic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDU-vilgic
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mkjonesuk 3y ago

“If you don't have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band.” - Buddy Rich

dwringer 3y ago

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.

smitty1e 3y ago

This is the sort of thing that one doubts a *GPT system will ever produce creatively. Advantage, humans.

code_duck 3y ago

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.

vondur 3y ago

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.

crtified 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

udev 3y ago

In my opinion Metallica's Eye of the Beholder produces an even more powerful effect with unusual timing. See the first minute of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEBp9ulELLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEBp9ulELLA If you have good speakers, the effect can almost feel like the source of the sound is rotating around you.

ideamotor 3y ago
I’m not a big metallica fan but that album is great, especially the first part of that song, as you said.