TRUE or FALSE: Lars Ulrich of Metallica is a terrible drummer

there's one lead riff Kirk added in the mid-90s that hurts more than it helps and I wish he would retire it...takes me out of the moment.

This happens a ton in the studio now with metal production where you get producers doing microscopic edits all over metal drumming by shifting hits around next to a metronome grid. People spend hours upon hours editing that stuff.

― earlnash, Sunday, March 29, 2015 11:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't think there's any genre where moving all beats over to snap to grid isn't now the norm

having a nightmare now of going to see some tech metal band and having the drummer only be able to do kick+snare, kick+snare and audience starts booing

This happens a ton in the studio now with metal production where you get producers doing microscopic edits all over metal drumming by shifting hits around next to a metronome grid. People spend hours upon hours editing that stuff.

― earlnash, Sunday, 29 March 2015 23:04 (Yesterday) Permalink

A relative of mine was in a pro-style metal band, who worked with a "name" producer (I feel like he had done stuff with Korn or someone), they spent three weeks and untold amounts of money working on their album. The entire first week was getting drum sounds and recording each individual drum, uploading it into a computer and assembling the drum beats that way.

The drummer who played on the record was a fill-in guy. After the band got home and started looking for a new drummer they were dismayed to find out that no one could play any of the songs as they had been created in the computer. They spent a few frustrating months of not being able to get a replacement they eventually broke up and I don't think the album ever actually came out.

LOL this thread is a great window into the insanity of modern metal.

thankfully James quit doing the "I'm bored so I'm going to fuck around" mentality vocally speaking

you will die

OHHHHHH

when i sayyy

WATCH ME NOW

love dizazter. this is from this year. impiety are from singapore but dizazter is from australia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-X2kNoPFSc

Is the "No samples, no triggers" Bandcamp disclaimer 2015's answer to the "NO SYNTHS" LP shrink wrap sticker, or what?

Once you start down the adjusting-drum-hits-individually, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Posting this video to this thread because the drummer rules. Thanks to scott seward for posting it somewhere else!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaOLR9N0WVM

yeah!

great beat. btw you guys might enjoy this thread:
Drum geek sick chops youtube thread

All Che-a's YouTube videos are from 2010-2011; I wonder what happened to them? I bet they have regular jobs now.

you can always listen to stone among many other cool bands inspired by metallica. their drummer was cool. metallica famously supposedly stole their cool riff. and then the drummer ended up in amorphis? i think?

Read that as "the drummer ended up in animorphs"

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3a/Animorphs_32_The_Separation.jpg

Once you start down the adjusting-drum-hits-individually, forever will it dominate your destiny.

http://i.usatoday.net/life/_photos/2011/09/11/More-Seeds-We-Sow-for-Lindsey-Buckingham-4BCGU0G-x-large.jpg
"Tell me about it."

I've heard that there was one Fleetwood Mac song where Mick decided he had to have his drums recorded with ribbon mics - very expensive, very sensitive, very easily damaged microphones usually used for vocals - and they blew out a bunch of them while recording his drum parts in multiple takes.

lol most engineers I know are hesitant to let singers at a ribbon mic, you can blow those things out easy and indeed they are massively expensive

I heard that Tony Cohen set out to record the Birthday party's Junkyard with contact mics attached to the interior of the drumkit which kept on blowing.

Reminds me of the story in the making of Never Mind The Bollocks video where they talk about finally getting a real cheap mic for Johnny Rotten so he could kind of throw it around and give the required performance.

Also, for a while thought that picture of Lindsey Buckingham was Jojo Mayer for some reason.

Hmmm.

http://i.imgur.com/GLTmA28.jpg

I've heard that there was one Fleetwood Mac song where Mick decided he had to have his drums recorded with ribbon mics - very expensive, very sensitive, very easily damaged microphones usually used for vocals - and they blew out a bunch of them while recording his drum parts in multiple takes.

― ^^^ NOT METAL (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Thursday, April 2, 2015 4:17 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's a great anecdote about mick and lindsay doing "what makes you think you're the one?" off tusk, and they are at the studio by themselves one night and they actually take apart a handheld cassette recorder and put the mic from that inside the snare drum to get that sound (the whole unsaid subtext to the anecdote being "we were insanely coked up")

but yeah i almost wish there was a special ILM metal thread for "metal records that don't sound like shit" because i would check them out no matter what genre

also lars 4 ever #! lars fan 4 life! lars ulrich fan club!

The Ringo of metal imo. Team Lars 4 Life

re: this, I don't think Kirk gets enough flack for how badly he occasionally blows this live. like, there's mistakes, and there's him occasionally falling two entire measures behind (as I pointed out upthread), hitting the wrong frets, bending out of tune, or on one 1986 bootleg, actually fucking up the harmonized interlude to Master of Puppets because he started on the wrong fret and couldn't fix it, so he was playing dissonant garbage while James played it correctly.

and then there are the shows where he IS a machine and nails everything. but he's so casual live to the point where he sometimes comes across as not gaf, and yet the knock on Kirk = "he's a lame guitarist in that his lead compositions suck, but he can play technically like a mo'fo!".

anywho, I stand by what I said upthread about Lars, but lord, Kirk has degraded over the years and hides a lot of his mistakes in wah (which he's done for years), but I'm fairly sure they had to fix a lot via overdubs on live recordings for him.

James does seem to have been the glue that held the rickety thing together, but I also think there has to be a reason two of his bandmates remained constant throughout the band's career, the same band that is way more successful and popular than p much all of the bands with "better" drummers/guitarists.

It's amazing how many huge bands have at least one member that really can't play - Kiss, U2, the Stones (Charlie, sue me), I'm sure there's more. I suppose that crap musicians learn to come up with interesting workarounds occasionally, although most people in loser bands are just crap at even that.

I don't even really think Lars is "crap." The technical standards in metal are pretty high and he may not meet them, but I enjoy his feel, sound, fills etc.

i think i'd be even nicer about lars' drumming now than i was upthread but i have a lot more appreciation for individual feel these days even if that feel can be described as stiff. on justice he is just this thrumming industrial machine, and he has a real understanding of drum fills as hooks

kirk is really the sloppiest of any of them live but i find it impossible to criticize him because he is like a baby kitten whose feelings i care about

he was playing dissonant garbage

Didn't know they'd pioneered this too.

Yeah totally, re fills as hooks. I think one of the flaws of a lot of drummers with greater technical prowess is that they fail to understand that the kind of hyper-advanced shit they are doing gives people too much sonic information to process, esp if they're not watching your youtube video while listening.

Re: Lars, I watched some of those Hardwired making-of videos recently, and while it's no Some Kind of Monster, it's the closest window to seeing their Justice-style writing process. It's pretty clear that even though James writes the actual riffs & melodies, the songs wouldn't really exist without Lars. He's the arranger, he's the one making confident decisions about which riffs go together and become songs, where to repeat little cells and insert extra bars, which takes are keepers, etc.

Also every now and then he'll play a little fill and it just sounds iconically Lars, I don't have a bad word to say about him (even if he has atrocious time live, but he can turn it on in the studio, so who cares).

most modern metal albums sound quantized to fuck so it's kind of hard to say who's got it and who doesn't

Lars always seems like he's playing someone else's kit. Like, the parts are all fine and good or great, but then you see him, and he always seems to be struggling to reach the right cymbals or hit the right tom.

Maybe he needs a more ergonomic drum set

He should never have stopped using that white Tama kit he had back in the day

Lars doesn't drum, he sits there while 4 burly me move his body up and down

so I'm watching one of the vids that came with the AJFA boxed set, and Lars is a split second off beat consistently during the "dun nuh nuh, duh nuh nuh" Part during "...And Justice for All", so it sounds like the aural equivalent of someone's boots getting stuck in the mud every few seconds.

the band is having to adjust to it and it is distracting af.

I’m inspired by your posts to revisit the remasters - working my way through the earlier stuff, the single RTL DVD and the two MOP DVDs, and Cliff Em All. The four (4!) Justice DVDs look a bit intimidating I have to say.

As a Johnny-come-lately to the metal scene, I even struggle with Metallica's classic studio recordings, let alone their live releases. Ride the Lightning comes closest to fully swaying me.

xpost it's really more like two actual shows, one video of handheld camcorder clips of parts of songs, and......i don't think i've seen the 4th one yet, i think it's interviews

the dvd from the Stone Balloon is great, cuz it's Metallica performing in a teeny club just so they could say htey play Delaware

I have a story about that Delaware show... I posted this on my Facebook some time ago but some here might enjoy it...

Metallica decided that they wanted to play all 50 states on the Damaged Justice Tour so they did a surprise show at the Stone Balloon, a beloved college-town club in Wilmington, Delaware. Seeing Metallica in a small club would have been amazing!

I have no idea how I figured it out in the pre-internet days but I found out about the show in advance and called the local promoters Cellar Door a few weeks in advance of the show. The guy on the phone was stunned that I heard about it and said he would reserve me tickets for the show!

Friend and sometime photographer David Rogers and Jeff Vander Clute of Metal Meltdown fanzine fame took the trip with me. We made a weekend of it - the day before I went to L'AMOUR in Brooklyn for the first time ever and caught DBC (Dead Brain Cells).

We crashed with my grandmother who lived in Jamaica. The next day we went into the city and visited some record labels (my fanzine Curious Goods was a reality at this point and Metal Meltdown was legendary in the underground so i was able to glom off of Jeff's established cred).

I remember meeting Larry Getlen, then a publicist for Roadracer (not Roadrunner yet) who gave me tons of stuff including Obituary's "Slowly We Rot" on vinyl and the first Last Crack cassette (he said of the latter project "that's really weird.")

We also visited Noise Records' NYC office and Sal Treppiedi hooked me up with a Kreator Extreme Aggression tee-shirt (when I wore it to a DC show people were in awe how I got it) as well as a shit ton of music.

Then we drove down to Delaware where a huge throng was there. My name was on the list but not to get in for free, just to get into the sold out show... And I was broke! But the guy from Cellar Door said he would trust me to mail him a check... Yay! We were going on!

But then they checked my ID. I was not 21. Entrance denied. Horrible!

In the forthcoming months I would get letters from other fanzine guys saying to me "Did you see me onstage singing 'Seek & Destroy'" and a little part of me died.

The show was bootlegged and released on vinyl (the cover of which is pictured here).

http://img.discogs.com/pLSy2faHu8-LRw6BYPTrudNkaZ8=/fit-in/600x605/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-626440-1140233939.jpeg.jpg

I never got it. The show is on YouTube if anyone wants to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WkLm6yLO_Q

Jeff is not on Facebook but I did exchange emails with him a couple years ago when I picked up the entire series of Metal Meltdown on eBay.

Oh man. Oh man oh man. I died with you during that story.

yeah that would have gutted me.

course I was 9 at the time so