I have been playing drums my entire life, over 25+ years at this point... And I have to say it took me FOREVER to properly transcribe this song and actually master playing it correctly. It really stuck out to me as something I had to learn ever since their last album came out. Not only because the song is amazing, but because the main base riff that the song is structured around is quite slow paced and deceptively simple sounding. I have spent a lot of years learning Meshuggah songs (I first started listening to them when Chaosphere came out in the late 90's, so I've been learning Meshuggah's songs for a long time) and It was driving me insane that no matter how many times I listened to Broken Cog, I would still occasionally slip up parts of the beat and have to find the rhythm again. Each time I thought I had finally figured out the main riffs in the few variations that they're played, I would realize I'd taught myself part of it wrong or was wanting to combine different versions of it from different parts of the song... I would get so annoyed with myself because the song makes you think you can just learn it by ear, but you really need to write it out or program it into music software to understand it correctly. I eventually just had to physically transcribe the whole thing out in visual format with my music software and play along with it over and over at slower tempos with a metronome so I could finally understand it. Once you've finally gotten that main structural polyrhythm into your muscle memory, you will feel like a genuine beast jamming along with it though lol.
Get you. I'm not a drummer but not that bad at finger tapping to (some) Meshuggah songs. But this one is just weird. Sounds too easy, but I can't even do the whole intro.
@@svengah there's pros and cons to which ever position you view the show from and it's great to see the footage from your perspective. Where I saw them at Bristol I put in quite a lot of effort to get to a central position near the front so I could see the man in action. My persistence was rewarded when it came to the end of the show and he tossed out the drumsticks! (No drum heads - or cymbals - though!!)
They all have IEMs (in ear monitors), they listen to a click so they can play all sinchronized and the lights are programmed to the click as well, they also hear themselves and a mix of their preference of the other instruments/vocals