Riff Analysis 055 - Obituary "Infected"
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- čas přidán 17. 09. 2022
- Slimy.
Roger Grant's book: www.amazon.com/Beating-Measur...
My old video about a similar thing in an Ingurgitating Oblivion riff: • Riff Analysis 014 - In...
Dream Theater video from last week partially about alternating meter: • Riff Analysis 054 - Dr...
Tab I used is by note-4-note.
Patreon, where you can support the channel, get exclusive videos, your name in the credits, all the diagrams I make for these, and input for my rapid fire riff videos: www.patreon.com/metalmusictheory
My music: www.bandcamp.com/floridekstasis
Recent comp with my music on it: machinemusic.net/2022/09/17/m...
My website, which has all my videos and academic work nicely organized: www.calderhannan.com - Hudba
8:34 Cause of Deathspacito \m/
The intro transitions are now a big part of why I immediately click on a new Metal Music Theory video.
Another old school death metal example is Suffocation's "Effigy of the Forgotten", around the 2:50 mark.
This tempo flexibility was something Obituary lost on their later albums and it really hurt them. Glad you brought it up
Come for the intros, stay for the outros.
Thanks! I think the mayor reason for steady tempo in the „Year 2000+ Songs“ is in fact the DAW.
If you are listening to records from the 80s, the tempo is all over the place - most times not intentionally. But - this makes a lot of tracks heavy as F. For sure: a lot of musicians played way beyond their capabilities and this resulted in a drummer slowing down complex parts. Or the drummer was rushing in parts he liked. Or - it was planned like you described for Obituary.
It doesn’t matter why it happens: tempo modulation is a mighty tool in order to give your music a specific feeling. 20 years ago I played as the Synth guy in a metal band and we started to use a Drum Computer. I had to program at least 20-50 tempo changes per song in order to get the feeling right. We spend weeks and weeks of rehearsal just to get these tempo maps...
Today I (assuming I am not alone with that) try to get the feeling with more and more complex programmed drum patterns. Or throwing my XYZ virtual drummer on a track. That’s not working, since the „unstable“ tempo is a core element of Death Metal. In my opinion, the more modern sound is somehow reduced Death Metal, so it is way more important to produce a rich and heavy sound in order to be as heavy as the guys in the past.
Long story short: A good drummer defines the feeling of a track by the tempo modulation and rhythm - the great ones can make „Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star“ sound dark…
Interesting, do you have solid examples of drummers rushing the parts he likes, or slowing down too difficult parts? I don't mean songs, I mean scientific data.
@@jean-christophearsenault2104 No, I've only anecdotal data. Which means, that I see it all the time analysing old records and/or my own experience playing in a band. We switched from a real drummer to an MPC (like Samael 🙂) and the challenges started: Parts were unplayable for the guitar player, the machine "was not tight" etc. Newertheless: this would be a nice paper. I just tried to imagine the interview with the musicans:
- "So, why do you think you s##k when you have to play tight to a click?"
- "Why do you change the speed by 5bpm within 32 beats, when it is not part of the composition?"
Long story short: a band is a system - each elemet will change its behaviour. If you introduce a maschine (or a metronome), this will have a great impact...
@@derived-doom Interesting, thanks for the talk!
re: click tracks in death metal, I remember reading on the Derek Roddy forum a million years ago that for "Black Seeds of Vengeance" Nile recorded all of his drum parts to clicks and then pieced together the songs in Pro-Tools, so clicks had found their way into the genre by at least the year 2000
Good video. I love this sort of thing
You are amazing. Thanks a lot!
I was thinking about horror the whole time... Like, maybe the shifting tempos are a correlate for or simulation of the way your heart drops or jumps during a horror movie?
ooh I like that! Hadn't thought of that.
I have actually composed a track where the intro riffs alternate between 160 and 180bpm. Since they're very similar murky nonsense-chords, they could have been played at the same tempo, but Iiked how the small bump in tempo gave it a feeling of something impending before going back to base tempo. Definitely fun technique to use, just as swamp masters of Obituary did!
Wish I see them live one day here in India
Loved the outro song
DESPACITO!!
Liturgito
Could also be worth transcribing some powerviolence for more modern examples of this kind of thing, I think "as many sloppy direct tempo changes as you can fit into a grind-length song" is practically the main thing that distinguishes it as a subgenre.
I mentioned the on your Ingurgitating Oblivion but Martyr goes crazy with tempo changes on their album Warp Zone, even in the official tab you have stuff like tempo changing by small amounts (less than ten) and tempo shifts that don't fit into any tuple modulations, not sure if they first played it by feel and then just tabbed it out and went with how it turned out or they programmed a click track and then played with it. The album feels like it was made with a click track but who knows.
Either way how do you even precisely approach subtle tempo shifts such as the example from the video where it goes 120->156->136->158.
Also really weird how the first shifted section is 156 and the last one 158, I doubt they planned a 2 bpm difference but it still feels strange looking at the tab.
i wonder if its like an attempt at rhythmic modularity - like when a dotted 8th becomes an 8th in new tempo? its close enough -> wonder if it would lose the part that makes it special if at 120/160
*subconscious attempt* i think sounds awesome 😊😈
Yeah a couple other people pointed this out and I had a long response, but basically, I think yes to both-it could be that this was how these changes started and then they drifted, but also I think the cool weird, abruptness is because they're off by enough to be noticeable
This video is a really verbose way to say that Obituay were just whatever the fuck they came up with lmao
Something that I noticed in some OSDM songs it that sometimes some of these tempos are 'kind of related' if you look close enough.
Like for example a jump from 8th notes played at 130bpm to 8th notes played at 195bpm can produce a feeling similar to playing 8th notes (at 130bpm) and then switching to 8th notes triplet (still at 130bpm). In both cases the 'note flow' is mutiplied by 1,5. Might explain why some change feel so natural in spite of the tempo jumps.
Same reply as to the similar comment:
Yeah the "sloppy pivot pulse modulations" (which is what I've been calling them in my notes) definitely happen-the simple version is like when you have a section in "double time" that goes from 100 to 210bpm, where it's clear what they were going for but they got excited and overshot a little. But I don't think that's what's happening here, for two main reasons (should have made a bigger point of this in the video).
The more important one is that in this riff they're off by a lot-the actual tempo of the fast parts is roughly 156, and if that were sixteenth notes, eighth note triplets would be at 117, but in this riff the slower sections are around 136bpm. This is more than 10% off (which is kind of the threshold of hearing different note values, I've found), and it's enough that at least to me they sound too wrong to be able to count them like that-I'd have to hear the sixteenth note/eighth note triplet relation, but then stretch it beyond recognition anyway. The "slow" and "fast" tempos are also not all the same even within this section.
The other is kind of an "if a tree falls..." argument, in that there's no connective tissue actually in the riff to hint at the pivot pulse. You can mathematically relate any two tempos to each other, of course, but I argue that it only counts as a pivot pulse modulation if the band actually makes it feel like one by using the pivot value in the context of both tempos. So like in my Wormed video (and Entheos video too, and maybe others) I talked about a clear tempo modulation where they use a dotted quarter note as the pivot, and you hear it in both the context of the old tempo and the new tempo. But without precision, and without any music that connects the pivot value on either side of the tempo change, I think that these riffs are definitely direct tempo changes.
Also what I was getting at later in this video is that they definitely didn't track this with a click-I think they started using a click at some point in their career, maybe around 2005, but there's no way they tempo mapped this album.
@DreamPurpleFloyd What you mention is a much more common technique called "metric modulation". That's when tempo changes in integer ratios: 2:3, 3:5, etc.
Changing tempos to non related ratios is also common in metal. What's not common and covered in this video is changing tempo back and forth between non related ratios.
Interestingly (apropos click tracks and death metal) I interviewed one of the great legends of anti-click (at least in feel) in death metal, Chris Reifert, and we discuss that "slippery" feel directly. Albeit I'm not sure in terms of tempo change, or alternating tempo, because I don't know how often Autopsy did that, but as an overall feel or aesthetic.
That's awesome, amazing interview! That thing about taking the Rolling Stones as an influence is interesting, I hadn't really thought of all the predecessors of this sort of thing outside of metal or in other metal... someone else brought up that Obituary were big into Mercyful Fate, which I had no idea about
@@metalmusictheory5401 We talk about it in both interviews, but I think I may have had in mind the other, older one. He talks about the click track explicitly here. Like a train almost coming off the rails or something like that
was just typing a praising comment and that despacito kicked in hahahaha
Hello, I rediscovered this channel just today. It's not death metal and not very complex musically I'd guess but if you want to, check any song on Aq'Ab'Al by Volahn. It's super melodious black metal and I think it's worth checking out because the guy behind it has influence from Southern US/Northern Mexican folk music.
Try this. Take the metronome on your phone, set the tempo to 160 bpm at 16th notes, then alternate from 16th notes to 8th note triplets between the two sections, I believe that is what's going on here. I don't know what theory term for that is, but I'm confident of this explanation as it would be easier to click track.
Damn you beat me to it, I posted something similar haha
Yeah the "sloppy pivot pulse modulations" (which is what I've been calling them in my notes) definitely happen-the simple version is like when you have a section in "double time" that goes from 100 to 210bpm, where it's clear what they were going for but they got excited and overshot a little. But I don't think that's what's happening here, for two main reasons (should have made a bigger point of this in the video).
The more important one is that in this riff they're off by a lot-the actual tempo of the fast parts is roughly 156, and if that were sixteenth notes, eighth note triplets would be at 117, but in this riff the slower sections are around 136bpm. This is more than 10% off (which is kind of the threshold of hearing different note values, I've found), and it's enough that at least to me they sound too wrong to be able to count them like that-I'd have to hear the sixteenth note/eighth note triplet relation, but then stretch it beyond recognition anyway. The "slow" and "fast" tempos are also not all the same even within this section.
The other is kind of an "if a tree falls..." argument, in that there's no connective tissue actually in the riff to hint at the pivot pulse. You can mathematically relate any two tempos to each other, of course, but I argue that it only counts as a pivot pulse modulation if the band actually makes it feel like one by using the pivot value in the context of both tempos. So like in my Wormed video (and Entheos video too, and maybe others) I talked about a clear tempo modulation where they use a dotted quarter note as the pivot, and you hear it in both the context of the old tempo and the new tempo. But without precision, and without any music that connects the pivot value on either side of the tempo change, I think that these riffs are definitely direct tempo changes.
Also what I was getting at later in this video is that they definitely didn't track this with a click-I think they started using a click at some point in their career, maybe around 2005, but there's no way they tempo mapped this album.
@@metalmusictheory5401 I agree about the tempo maps, there is no good evidence to support that they used a click track. My earlier point, which after re-reading I realize I made poorly, is that these "quarter note/triplet note" modulations, are probably more of a "feel thing" then something planned. That "quarter note/triplet note" modulation" is probably something that was used during a chops building phase, and internalized to the point where it appeared as a natural expression later, akin to how a shred guitarist might practice building speed with a metronome....
Keep up the good work btw...
Have you noticed how this section doesnt feel like the average listener needs to change the headbanging pattern in any way that would feel significant, but it is significant enough to make them awkward? So you slowly force yourself to the new tempo, but then you just get a single measure and that makes it even more awkward. Nice.
The real question is if this sort of stuff makes Car Bomb less cool or impressive. Maybe their tempo manipulations are more advanced than some of this, but in my mind, maybe they aren't that cutting edge as I had begun to think if this used to be the norm. Or alternatively, are they super cool for bringing back a "lost" aesthetic of metal.
Work sucks, and microtonal metal is hard to write. But I have great friends lol.
Have you finished infinite jest? I’m stuck at like 20% haha
That's the most disgusting Despacito I've ever heard.