Meshuggah (Violent Sleep of Reason)
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Would love to see some meshuggah drum tracks off of their new album. Anyone with the authoring skill and passion for this great band have anything in the works?
I’ve just started to learn charting myself but I’ve got a long, LONG way to go before I’d be able to do something like Meshuggah by ear. The tempo mapping alone would drive me nuts with the way they play.
I’ve just started to learn charting myself but I’ve got a long, LONG way to go before I’d be able to do something like Meshuggah by ear. The tempo mapping alone would drive me nuts with the way they play.
That’s exactly my problem. A lot of their songs are in 4/4 or other simple signatures but the weird polymeter shit they pull on most tracks makes tempo mapping a living hell.
That’s exactly my problem. A lot of their songs are in 4/4 or other simple signatures but the weird polymeter shit they pull on most tracks makes tempo mapping a living hell.
When you tempo map complex time signatures try one thing first: do NOT adjut BPMs by much. After having trained yourself to follow kicks and snares and snapping to spikes, you might be tempted to make the notes fit in measures with the wrong time signature just because they seem to fit the grid with a very different BPM rate. Sometimes even when the tempo seems to slow down it’s just because the drummer has dropped to one snare note per measure or to half the notes per measure. Of course you will find songs with radically different BPM rates between measures but more often than not it’s just a different pattern.
When you tempo map complex time signatures try one thing first: do NOT adjut BPMs by much. After having trained yourself to follow kicks and snares and snapping to spikes, you might be tempted to make the notes fit in measures with the wrong time signature just because they seem to fit the grid with a very different BPM rate. Sometimes even when the tempo seems to slow down it’s just because the drummer has dropped to one snare note per measure or to half the notes per measure. Of course you will find songs with radically different BPM rates between measures but more often than not it’s just a different pattern.
Great advice. I somewhat figured this out a few months back, doing songs where the downbeat isn’t accentuated with anything clear like a snare or crash+kick drum hit, or if that typical crash+kick drum is a half measure before the actual downbeat, which I’ve had to deal with on a few songs now (such as Milk Lizard). Sometimes I do some time signature fuckery to make it easier to map stuff like that (and Meshuggah absolutely falls into this category on most of their songs), like turning a bar that’s in 4/4 and splitting it up into 7/8 and then 9/8 on the next bar to catch up. These days I tend to just rely on the metronome to make sure everything’s good and synced before moving on with tempo mapping.
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