Meshuggah Metal Riff Lesson Part 4 

Not Fredrik, it's Mårten

@@sjn_ ur joking right

My favorite is when they start the riff in the "middle", so that it lines up at the end of section in 4/4.

+holygroove2 I think most people should be able to wrap their head around the logic behind certain riffs (for example in death is death around 3:50, the one in obzen etc) after listening to it maybe... 5 times. If not there's got to be something wrong.

+holygroove2 well yes when any given person attempts to understand music, they will make use of certain methods that they are familiar with. Unfortunately the schooling of music often overlooks the feel and actual musicality of music and focuses on different numbers and scales and whatnot. Meshuggah however has taken a step outside the box of traditional ( well historically speaking its untraditional but nvm) musicality and rythm and they have managed to create a lot of music based on either their visual or emotional interpretation of something (in or out of this world) on a much higher level - seeing as they did not confine themselves as strictly and to as much of the counting-music-writing stuff. They have expressed that the album Catch 33 is mostly a visual musical experience for them, which was where i derived some of that from. And they have said that the earlier albums were alot about expressing anger externally. Of course we are closing in on the level of musical interpretation which is exclusive to each different individual and cannot easily be measured and definitely not counted ;) Cheers man :D hope it made sense, i usually just write whatever i think, and sometimes that gets a bit messy :P

THERAMMSTEINFAN490 you're making sense for sure. My favorite albums are Chaosphere and Nothing which are indeed "angry" but also very musical...they explore anger in a multifaceted way. Not just external anger, but internal. On Nothing, they express regret...it's hard to see the layers because their expression is very strong, and very focused, but the layers are there nonetheless. Cheers back to you!

Poodle ͡ ͜ ͡ Yes - being trained is important, and I the musicians in Meshuggah are trained musicians. I like the fact that people who are not trained can hear what Meshuggah is doing. People who are trained can appreciate them even more.

The way that you learn their music is up to you, but my comment reflects what the band members say in all of their interviews. They may not be formally schooled, but they are educated. You can listen to a few of the interviews of the band to hear this. They may very well be a band of auto-didactic geniuses (if you exclude Lovgren). I'm cool with that. When I say that the music "projects itself in 4", I'm saying that I think that people somehow feel the underlying pulse. As complicated as the "micro" is, the "macro" is still dominant, which is the power of Meshuggah's music. You feel a pull towards the "1" even though you don't understand the micro. Also, since the music is usually in 4, you get an even number of measures. At the very least, you'll have a guide to help you "get back on" when you're lost in the micro. It might help some people to think of the smaller intricate aspects as though they are in a mixed meter, but asserting that Meshuggah's music is all mixed meter stuff is wrong (as you've stated). The early albums had mixed meter stuff and they feel different. The "weight" comes from the gravity attached to the 4/4 pulse - and the deceptive way that the riffs seem to pull away from that even pulse. I certainly don't mean to diminish your work as a musician by making such a broad statement about it being in 4 - there are some tunes that I still struggle with as a die-hard musically educated fan. Electric Red and some others still have me reeling in amazement. I think the riff cycles on some of the "Violent Sleep"...tunes are longer than they've done in the past, OR they've done something new that we're not aware of. They like to present something new for each album that they debut.

6 years late! But it looks like a pinched harmonic.

I believe it's actually just playing a minor second (Or a half-step interval) dyad on the 13th and 17th frets of the highest and second highest strings, respectively, before moving up a half step to the 14th and 18th.