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Comment by Demiurge | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Well there two different Larses. There's the young driven, actually trying Lars of the 80s. He was great, AJFA was pretty ahead of its time as far as metal drumming goes.

Then you got the ageing, not keeping shape, rich Lars who's become somewhat infamous for not being a very tight drummer, and that's definitely been true for several periods of his later career.

He's also well know for having a somewhat unconventional and mechanically inefficient technique. This was fine when he was younger, and less fine once he started getting older.

It's very easy to consistently play a rhythm incorrectly. I have done and heard this many times as a musician.

How do you define "incorrectly"? IMHO the author of the song consistently plays it one way, then that's the correct execution of that rhythm, and playing it differently would be a different rhythm, not the one intended.

I should have used scare quotes. "In a way which someone other than the performer may call incorrect." Which is the case here.

I guess my point is, playing "accurately" (according to the traditional musical rhythmic grid) and "precisely" (repeatably) are independent skills. I for one am stronger in the latter than the former.

I'd say that playing from notation and notating what's played are two very different things - in the latter, any difference between notation and execution means that it's the notation that is inaccurate; and in this particular case (as with quite a few others) the traditional notation system is too limited to properly notate this part of the song, as that 5/8 measure is the closest thing that can be reasonably written, but it's wrong because that part of the song is not really 5/8 but something like 5.3/8 ..

in this case he's the author of the music so whatever he plays is correct

If it’s true that Flemming Rasmussen hand edited every beat of the drum track, that explains the statistics and consistency.

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.

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 ...

It'd be interesting to find out how many times they practiced that song before recording it. It's hard to overstate how much time and attention people had before ubiquitous cell phones and internet.

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