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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/notatio

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".
- jcastro 3y ago
  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.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzIksH67hA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzIksH67hA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnIHVvEwbLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnIHVvEwbLk It's impressive how much a song can shift from its underlying chords and retain the same vibe.
- jdwithit 3y ago
  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.
klodolph 3y ago
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.
timc3 3y ago
"We wound up just deciding that we should play it to the click, speed up the pauses just a bit. It takes away a little personality but keeps the song tight." I wouldn't have done that, in though it's a massive pain I would have used the tools in the DAW to change the timing to match the song, and not the other way around.
- sickcodebruh 3y ago
  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.
mikeryan 3y ago
While I think the matter has more recently settled it there was a time where folks thought that Outkast's "Hey Ya" was in 11/4. It's in 4/4 with a 2/4 bar but it still had a lot of folks confused for a while and a whole TikTok meme that lasted for a bit. https://melodics.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/11/a-lesson-in-counting-from-hey-ya/ https://melodics.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/11/a-lesson-in-c...
- OscarCunningham 3y ago
  That means that 'Hey Ya' has the same time signature as 'Say a Little Prayer'!
- chubot 3y ago
  Ha that's great, I always wondered about that song. While I see why people say "4/4 with a 2/4 bar" -- doesn't that feel like a matter of definition? I would just say it doesn't have a "square" pulse -- it has a pulse that's 11 or 22. To me that is the defining characteristic; that's what it sounds like. Whether you call it 11/4 or 11/2 or "4/4 with a 2/4" bar seems to be creating a difference out of something that's not really there. --- Also nice to see The Cars "Just What I Needed" in that blog post. I remember my friend's band did a cover of it and I asked them about that "hiccup" / inversion in a pop song ... I think he said they just didn't do it ?
  - padjo 3y ago
    4/4 would probably indicate a large stress on the one and smaller one on the three of each bar. 11/4 would probably indicate a large stress on the one and small stresses on the three, five etc I would play them differently anyway
    - tunesmith 3y ago
      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 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 pretty quick with Hey Ya.
weinzierl 3y ago
"It’s a process of playing a riff, figuring out the comfortable tempo and time signature, setting it in Reaper, then playing along to it until there’s a change and doing it again." Not sure it helps, but you can use a tempo map in Reaper to basically warp the grid to your audio. In Classical and Romantic music where Tempo Rubato is pretty common this is a life-saver.
- sickcodebruh 3y ago
  My stuff is generally stupid enough that we can do it the simple and primitive way. One of the perks of playing certain kinds of extreme metal!
sophacles 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeytZ8qvbTk
cptnapalm 3y ago
Was in a black metal band and there was this one riff we had a problem syncing up at the end for the transition to the next. Sometimes we'd nail it, other times it fell apart. Turned out that, while the drum beat was 4/4, the first riff was not. We just hadn't noticed. Once we figured that out, we hit it every time and it was glorious.
- karlgrz 3y ago
  I know this pain and joy feeling, too! "You're off time...no you're off time. Oh, wait...we're all off time in different ways, let's get it right!" Black metal is loads of fun to play on guitar :-)
- sickcodebruh 3y ago
  What was the black metal band?
  - cptnapalm 3y ago
    Catholicon: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Catholicon/4336 https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Catholicon/4336
golergka 3y ago
Couldn't you just re-trigger the click with some MIDI control?
sbierwagen 3y ago
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 https://youtu.be/kbyGHDMPA7E
- RyJones 3y ago
  Common thing for performers - they play faster on stage unless they're really disciplined (using a click track for timing or similar)
  - m463 3y ago
    sounds like, everyone. Doesn't it start as a schoolkid, where you too fast giving a presentation up at the board? how can you not compress time in front of others unless you're practiced?
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    If I was playing on stage and there were 100 naked women waiting in the dressing room for me I'd speed it up a bit myself.
- lancesells 3y ago
  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.
- sickcodebruh 3y ago
  This era of Metallica was the greatest metal band that ever did or will exist.
mkw2000 3y ago
I'm a big fan of anything that's very Suffocation, I'd love to listen
- sickcodebruh 3y ago
  This particular song won't be recorded until later this year but the last album is easy to find online. Glorious Depravity - "Ageless Violence". It's influenced by 90s American death metal in general, I'm not sure you'll get a big Suffo vibe throughout but there are moments.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    For the lazy: https://gloriousdepravity.bandcamp.com/album/ageless-violence https://gloriousdepravity.bandcamp.com/album/ageless-violenc... Sounds pretty sweet.
    - jcpst 3y ago
      One of the members is from Pyrrhon, which I've been a fan of for a long time. Legit. This is on my wishlist now.
      - sickcodebruh 3y ago
        He will be glad to hear that! You should check out his other other band if you haven't already, Weeping Sores. Dramatic doom/death. https://weepingsores.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-sores https://weepingsores.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-sores
        jcpst 3y ago
        Yes, I am down with this. What a great day on Hacker News. A long time ago, back when I had a neo-no-wave group and worked as a recording engineer, we hooked up with a number of NYC folks- Friendly Bears, Toby Driver/Kayo Dot, Colin Marston’s bands… Now that I don’t have to grind so hard bootstrapping my software career anymore, I’ve been putting together a new group. But who cares really- just cool being able to talk music w/ HNers.
larrydag 3y ago
Apparently due to these timing challenges in that album Lars Ulrich does not like playing Eye of the Beholder live. https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/lars-ulrich-hates-metallica-track/ https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/lars-ulrich-hates-metallica-tra...
- scott_s 3y ago
  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.
twobitshifter 3y ago
I was in my music theory class in high school trying to transcribe 3 or 4 bars I played on the keyboard into the midi software. I couldn’t get it and so I called the teacher over who was a long time conductor. He tried for the rest of class and couldn’t get it. It was simple and in rhythm, but just not something that fit into any notation. There are many “groove window” combination of swing, articulation, syncopation and time that there’s not always a straightforward notation for. Really that style of notation is an attempt to bend the music to classical rules that it doesn’t align with. I wonder if this will be lost as music gets less personal in production.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  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.
ilamont 3y ago
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."
thelastparadise 3y ago
> It takes away a little personality but keeps the song tight. But is it worth it? You've taken away the soul of the song.
atoav 3y ago
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.
bondarchuk 3y ago
>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.
- sickcodebruh 3y ago
  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.

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".

jcastro 3y ago
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.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzIksH67hA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzIksH67hA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnIHVvEwbLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnIHVvEwbLk It's impressive how much a song can shift from its underlying chords and retain the same vibe.
jdwithit 3y ago
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.

klodolph 3y ago

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.

timc3 3y ago

"We wound up just deciding that we should play it to the click, speed up the pauses just a bit. It takes away a little personality but keeps the song tight." I wouldn't have done that, in though it's a massive pain I would have used the tools in the DAW to change the timing to match the song, and not the other way around.

sickcodebruh 3y ago
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.

mikeryan 3y ago

While I think the matter has more recently settled it there was a time where folks thought that Outkast's "Hey Ya" was in 11/4. It's in 4/4 with a 2/4 bar but it still had a lot of folks confused for a while and a whole TikTok meme that lasted for a bit. https://melodics.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/11/a-lesson-in-counting-from-hey-ya/ https://melodics.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/11/a-lesson-in-c...

OscarCunningham 3y ago
That means that 'Hey Ya' has the same time signature as 'Say a Little Prayer'!
chubot 3y ago
Ha that's great, I always wondered about that song. While I see why people say "4/4 with a 2/4 bar" -- doesn't that feel like a matter of definition? I would just say it doesn't have a "square" pulse -- it has a pulse that's 11 or 22. To me that is the defining characteristic; that's what it sounds like. Whether you call it 11/4 or 11/2 or "4/4 with a 2/4" bar seems to be creating a difference out of something that's not really there. --- Also nice to see The Cars "Just What I Needed" in that blog post. I remember my friend's band did a cover of it and I asked them about that "hiccup" / inversion in a pop song ... I think he said they just didn't do it ?
- padjo 3y ago
  4/4 would probably indicate a large stress on the one and smaller one on the three of each bar. 11/4 would probably indicate a large stress on the one and small stresses on the three, five etc I would play them differently anyway
  - tunesmith 3y ago
    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 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 1-2 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 pretty quick with Hey Ya.

weinzierl 3y ago

"It’s a process of playing a riff, figuring out the comfortable tempo and time signature, setting it in Reaper, then playing along to it until there’s a change and doing it again." Not sure it helps, but you can use a tempo map in Reaper to basically warp the grid to your audio. In Classical and Romantic music where Tempo Rubato is pretty common this is a life-saver.

sickcodebruh 3y ago
My stuff is generally stupid enough that we can do it the simple and primitive way. One of the perks of playing certain kinds of extreme metal!

sophacles 3y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeytZ8qvbTk

cptnapalm 3y ago

Was in a black metal band and there was this one riff we had a problem syncing up at the end for the transition to the next. Sometimes we'd nail it, other times it fell apart. Turned out that, while the drum beat was 4/4, the first riff was not. We just hadn't noticed. Once we figured that out, we hit it every time and it was glorious.

karlgrz 3y ago
I know this pain and joy feeling, too! "You're off time...no you're off time. Oh, wait...we're all off time in different ways, let's get it right!" Black metal is loads of fun to play on guitar :-)
sickcodebruh 3y ago
What was the black metal band?
- cptnapalm 3y ago
  Catholicon: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Catholicon/4336 https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Catholicon/4336

golergka 3y ago

Couldn't you just re-trigger the click with some MIDI control?

sbierwagen 3y ago

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 https://youtu.be/kbyGHDMPA7E

RyJones 3y ago
Common thing for performers - they play faster on stage unless they're really disciplined (using a click track for timing or similar)
- m463 3y ago
  sounds like, everyone. Doesn't it start as a schoolkid, where you too fast giving a presentation up at the board? how can you not compress time in front of others unless you're practiced?
- MisterTea 3y ago
  If I was playing on stage and there were 100 naked women waiting in the dressing room for me I'd speed it up a bit myself.
lancesells 3y ago
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.
sickcodebruh 3y ago
This era of Metallica was the greatest metal band that ever did or will exist.

mkw2000 3y ago

I'm a big fan of anything that's very Suffocation, I'd love to listen

sickcodebruh 3y ago
This particular song won't be recorded until later this year but the last album is easy to find online. Glorious Depravity - "Ageless Violence". It's influenced by 90s American death metal in general, I'm not sure you'll get a big Suffo vibe throughout but there are moments.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  For the lazy: https://gloriousdepravity.bandcamp.com/album/ageless-violence https://gloriousdepravity.bandcamp.com/album/ageless-violenc... Sounds pretty sweet.
  - jcpst 3y ago
    One of the members is from Pyrrhon, which I've been a fan of for a long time. Legit. This is on my wishlist now.
    - sickcodebruh 3y ago
      He will be glad to hear that! You should check out his other other band if you haven't already, Weeping Sores. Dramatic doom/death. https://weepingsores.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-sores https://weepingsores.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-sores
      - jcpst 3y ago
        Yes, I am down with this. What a great day on Hacker News. A long time ago, back when I had a neo-no-wave group and worked as a recording engineer, we hooked up with a number of NYC folks- Friendly Bears, Toby Driver/Kayo Dot, Colin Marston’s bands… Now that I don’t have to grind so hard bootstrapping my software career anymore, I’ve been putting together a new group. But who cares really- just cool being able to talk music w/ HNers.

larrydag 3y ago

Apparently due to these timing challenges in that album Lars Ulrich does not like playing Eye of the Beholder live. https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/lars-ulrich-hates-metallica-track/ https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/lars-ulrich-hates-metallica-tra...

scott_s 3y ago
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.

twobitshifter 3y ago

I was in my music theory class in high school trying to transcribe 3 or 4 bars I played on the keyboard into the midi software. I couldn’t get it and so I called the teacher over who was a long time conductor. He tried for the rest of class and couldn’t get it. It was simple and in rhythm, but just not something that fit into any notation. There are many “groove window” combination of swing, articulation, syncopation and time that there’s not always a straightforward notation for. Really that style of notation is an attempt to bend the music to classical rules that it doesn’t align with. I wonder if this will be lost as music gets less personal in production.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
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.

ilamont 3y ago

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."

thelastparadise 3y ago

> It takes away a little personality but keeps the song tight. But is it worth it? You've taken away the soul of the song.

atoav 3y ago

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.

bondarchuk 3y ago

>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.

sickcodebruh 3y ago
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.