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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.
by 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.
- brookst 3y ago…and he did that, consistently, with only a few millisecond variations, on exactly the same beat of the same riff, for the entirety of just that one song, and in live performances?
- IsTom 3y agoDrumming and generally keeping rhythm is a physical thing. You move your body parts (e.g. bopping head, swaying hips etc.) and it couples with how and when you're playing.
- brookst 3y agoAre you suggesting his movements in this one measure were so unique that they exactly doubled the length of one eighth note? At some point I think we have to put the “it was a freak accident that was repeated with precision over and over, forever” argument to bed.
- IsTom 3y agoWith n=1, for me there is a groove or three that are just muscle memory and I'd need a longer while to sit down and think if asked write them down. They came out from noodling around and coming to "huh, that sounds cool" and I imagine that's not something particularly uncommon for other people too.
- brookst 3y agoI think we lost the thread here. I wasn't suggesting Lars had millisecond-level intrinsic timing and an innovative approach to music theory. I was rejecting the idea that this beat came from incompetence. I think developing an interesting groove and being able to play it consistently in a song, and in live performances for years is evidence of drumming competence.
- Jolter 3y agoYou don’t play music, do you? It’s absolutely possible to learn a rhythm, groove or melody wrong, and to rehearse it until it sounds so right, the anything else sounds wrong to you. But your audience would notice.
- colanderman 3y agoAs a musician, I do not find this surprising at all. It's easy to internalize "incorrect" rhythms and pitches.
- PeterisP 3y agoDid he do that consistently or is it just an artifact seen in a single very heavily edited record? Is the same timing seen in this section of live concert recordings during those years?
- Jolter 3y agoI have not been a metal head for many years but my recollection is that the live albums and bootlegs have timing that varies all over the place. Especially on MoP and Battery, and a few other notable ones (The Four Horsemen) which have complicated rhythms.
- plorkyeran 3y agoYes, that's how playing music works. Whatever you do on your first playthrough is what you'll do on every playthrough if you don't specifically try to change it. Consistently reproducing a mistake is generally much easier than unlearning the mistake.
- mort96 3y agoI really wouldn't be surprised if "5/8" wasn't even mentioned anywhere until long after that part of the song was thought up. It just sounds good.
- spoonfeeder006 3y agoInteger subdivisions are kinda arbitrary too as well Probably we limit ourselves a lot if we're too confined to those without being able to express our energy But someone who is trained explicitly to play exact integer divisions will have trouble expressing their energy as much