I honestly can’t say enough how much more I love this album due to your series on it. I usually don’t see to “solve” music but knowing the quirks and insanity this one has made it click. Recently got an 8 string and been having the “learn all the meshuggah songs you can” honeymoon phase. They’re a lot easier now that I’m no longer using a 25.5” starter Ibanez 7. This song’s a bastard, for the record.
The animations you did were really cool and helpful! Also the whole concept of spatially chiastic part writing seems really interesting. Thanks for doing these, I love this series
those dot and line patterns look like electrons moving around a nucleus, or possible occult symbols. makes one wonder how synchronized this music is to other things
Haha for now only here, it's a little thing I threw together in Logic... someday I might polish all these little jingles a little more and put them up somewhere!
Enough order to demand your attention, enough entropy to escape abstraction. Excellent breakdown and some serious precision on the playing - it's nearly impossible to avoid fret squeaks and a bit of string noise but you nailed it!
I can listen to this album daily and it never grows old. I learn sometiing new every time I listen. This is my favorite track. Hearing it live last year blew my mind
I absolutely love how these songs make me headbang in one way and blow air from my mouth in a completely different way 🤣. This album in general is so vertigo inducing. Meshuggah is one of the handful of bands I avoid listening to while Im working. I cant really focus on anything else then. Its awesome. I am looking forward to your videos of the remaining ultra catchy tracks now! XXXXXXX
Hey great video! Would you ever being keen on doing theory breakdowns for some more Mathcore bands at all? The sheer complexity and technicality of the band’s musicianship is just unbelievably insane and I’d love to sit and just watch you analyze these ridiculously insane bands! haha Here’s some examples to check out if you don’t know them already: 1) Psyopus: - “Insects” - “The Burning Halo” 2) The Number 12 Looks Like You: - “Imagination Express” - “Grandfather” 3) Anything by Danza 4) Anything by Dillinger 5) Anything by Converge 6) Anything by Car Bomb Keep up the good work! Love this stuff!
Thanks! Already got Dillinger and Car Bomb videos (and another Car Bomb video coming soon)! Also got one about Pupil Slicer, and I mention a few more in some of my videos that go through a ton of examples (the rapid fire riff videos, metal ear training, metal tropes, etc). Would love to do something about psyopus, still trying to figure out how I would do that seeing as I'm never going to learn to play any of their stuff...
Oh my god please do Psyopus. Even if you can't play it (not like anyone else can anyway lol) Chris Arp has a couple playthrough videos that would probably be good enough references to more or less figure out what's going on
I have loved Meshuggah for over 13 years ever since I found them in high school drumline. I have never fully grasped “spatially chiastic” section of the song until you created your visual for it. Great stuff man.
thank you man, been waiting for years for a video like this! i always wondered if there were music educators aware of the theses concerning I and especially catch 33! would love to see your opinion and analysis of the entire album tbh this album has some of the most incredible moments in an album that i can think of. such a unique album, there's so many to talk about but the moment i heard the final riff and ending to sum was one of the most meaningful music moments i have ever had.
Really enjoying these videos, they’ve broadened my metal horizons and helped me understand even without any knowledge of music theory as it’s taught. I even found this album, the grotesque arena by feculent where the first song has a section that just descends and descends and descends.
Words cannot describe how much I enjoyed the visual representation of the spacially chiastic guitar patterns several times. I will also use the term "spacially chiastic" on frequent occasions in my everyday life from now on.
One question...how do you sleep at night? If you understand the THEORY of MESHUGGAH,you can write a book on how to decode women, gods number, fibonacci code, conspiracy theories..... i would have been awake all night long working furiously.............. are you an alien? do you see these patterns in your dreams? is a higher intelligence communicating to you cuz you my freind, understand these concepts so well. Can u take a binary code and show us how to make it to a "simple" meshuggah riff,in a half whole diminshed scale in say the key of F#....just requesting. Thanx in advance. You must have proud parents, siblings (if they get you and your work),gf,spouse...neighbors...community...state
I don't have very much background in theory besides what I catch online through channels like this over the years, this was really helpful! (Also there's a riff from my childhood that I figured was just a weird 4/4 that if you have a chance to listen to sometime I'm desperate for a brief time dissection of, which is the intro/verse riff on Blindside's track The Endings, the riff kinda sounds like if Gaza and Hawthorne Heights started a supergroup and has this very deconstructed, spacious but simultaneously mechanical arrangement in which all the instruments kind of get their brief moment of shine in the mix in a way that is undeniably catchy and underrated for it's weirdness. [P.p.s. you should do shorts! I feel like little requests like that would be a breeze for you])
to me, the first riff just sounds on the guitar like "one-two-three-four-onetwothreefour-" where the - is just a rest. that's it :) like at 2:18 visually there's 8 black squares, 8 red, 8 blue etc, but the first 4 are further apart than the second 4
I think the confusion lies in the misconception that meshuggah is polyrhythmic, when it is in fact not, and conflating that with meaning it is strictly a straight 4/4 beat with funky patterns. More accurately I'd call it polymeter. Multiple meters (usually with one being 4/4) overlayed and matching up in places, showing they are synced but different. So a bit of both interpretations, really.
Funny enough, I had the same x pattern when I tabbed it. That way I am not learning the notes to play buy just the pattern. With a forward and backward pattern going on. "Sum" riff is some of the most random riffs to analyze but there is still a pattern if you have hours to spend.
Wow, I love how much the layout of the fretboard plays a role in these compositions! The “X” patterned riff really blew my mind. So cool how drawing shapes on the fretboard and iterating on it makes such an interesting and menacing alien sound. I never would have guessed the underlying pattern.
You touched on this a little bit towards the end of the video, but the dance between entropic riffs and ordered patterns serves as another level of "paradox". As a guitar player viewing the low 8th string as one polar side and the 6th string as the opposite polar side, there manages to be a dance/bounce from 8th to 6th constantly. I view it as the riffs encapsulating paradox. One outlier to its opposite. Love your videos dude. Keep it up!!!
Not really, This riff sounds like something Marten would come up with. He is very visual when it comes to music. Whereas Fredrik is more about the sound and feel.
dude, just wanted to let you know, I came back several times for the outro alone. Showed it to my good music friends too you know. It's that good. Meshuggah is amazing.
I learned the first riff years ago and it was awesome to see that animation. Specifically watching the bottom string go through seemingly all combinations
Any time I dig more into their stuff I find all these details and realize again and again how hard it is to play this stuff as tight as they do... really mindblowing
3:00 1000% agree with everything you're saying here. "Meshuggah's music is all 4/4" is basically a thought terminating cliche at this point. First, its a gross oversimplification. Its almost always deployed in response to people expressing awe at the apparent chaos in the rhythms, with no further nuance, so those people get to go on thinking its just some esoteric music thing beyond their understanding (it precludes educating people or being usefully informative). _(Technically what Meshuggah does (I think) qualifies as cross-rhythms/cross-rhythmic, since the interplay between 4/4 and other meters is at play essentially non-stop through most of their music, and polyrhythms in general don't necessarily care about metric/hypermetric boundaries)._ Second, its not always 100% true even from a traditional, conservative boring western music theory standpoint. They've done 3/4 stuff several times, and also things where the snare is accenting the riff instead of hitting on 3 or 2&4, leaving only the hats/cymbals to keep the 4/4... and... I mean, at that point less than half of 1 out of 5 instruments is following the almighty 4/4. In those cases I think there's a debate to be had as to whether its mathematically dubious to continue insisting "its all 4/4 period end of story." Finally, yes the band themselves claim its all 4/4, and they're not wrong. But frankly, composers need not be aware of particular techniques to employ them. And what's more, if they aren't aware of them, then its actually likely that they aren't just saying that to say it, i.e. in their minds it actually IS 4/4. _Its ENTIRELY possible, likely, even, that they have no idea that say, IDID has a lot of 21/16 in it._ They just know the riff and know where to plug it in relative to the 4/4 when they play it. Its actually quite easy to come up with a beat and play to it without having ever counted what meter it equates to. Anyone who needs proof, just listen to the I EP; mapping out the meters for that would likely be harder than playing and recording it. Its the same with pitch/melody. One musicians minor key is another's 0/2/3/5/7/8/10. Rhythm is aggressively arithmetic, and like all math there's only 1 right answer, but numerous ways to get it. 9+9+9+5 is 100% as valid as 8+8+8+8. Meshuggah's perception of their own music doesn't NEED to be ours; I'm sure they'd prefer we have our own.
There's actually a really common cross-rhythm you hear a lot that goes 3+3+2 (1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2) - not a single composer that has used it is going to claim that its some non-4/4 galaxy-brain polyrhythm, but that doesn't mean that having ears tuned to that 3/3/2 instead of 4/4 is wrong or somehow less valid.
Thanks so much for your content and your effort. I love your Meshuggah series so much. Even though I feel like someone is trying to explain astrophysics to me, I'm glad for the chance to try to understand why I love the music so much.
I really loved this one, especially that it’s one of my absolute favorite metal songs of all time. You did a great job explaining everything. Unfortunately, when it comes to the rhythmic theory you didn’t help at all😂 I mean. I perfectly understood everything, but not gonna lie, the two ways of feeling the rhythm are just easier… I really can’t wait to see what other Meshuggah songs you gonna break down. I’m already prepared for the headache😂 Also, it would be great if you could to take a look and break down the way that clean and distorted guitars work in Dagger by Vildhjarta (or any other of their songs…). It always messes with my brains, that I feel the clean parts in a certain way, but then, when the heavy stuff goes on i really get lost, cause they would start their heavy riffs in uneven palaces. Don’t know If I explained that good enough. Anyways, great video! Can’t wait for more! 🖤
