Riff Analysis 023 - The Dillinger Escape Plan "Prancer"
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- Опубліковано 5 чер 2024
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This is based on my article "Difficulty as Heaviness" in Metal Music Studies; check it out here: www.ingentaconnect.com/conten...
And if you don't have institutional access, send me an email and I'd be happy to send you the article.
I mention that Johnathan Pieslak, Brad Osborn, and Jose Garza have said that DEP's rhythmic chaos is built from fast 2s and 3s; Osborn and Garza say this in their dissertations, and Pieslak says this in his Xpol podcast interview with Baptiste Wattiez.
I really enjoyed this. Thank you. It was defiantly intentional to make sure our music was alive and truly emotional, despite the technicality. In order to achieve this, if a grid was needed so that I could include programming and sound design, it was created using a live recording of Billy and I rehearsing the song without any concern for perfect accuracy. It was all emotion. Then we created the grid using the performance and then we aimed to achieve accuracy with the same energy during the final recording.
That you all pulled these songs off live is just mindblowing, still listening in 2023!
What I really like about DEP is just how catchy they can make all the chaotic riffs. The intro riff of 43% burnt, for example.
I recall an interview with one of the members of DEP where they mentioned how putting together a very small section during the writing process may take a whole day, and that they approach rhythms like this more like spoken language. This made sense to me when I read it. We all express very complex rhythms almost every time we speak, but we don't sit there and count subdivisions in the process.
Yeah the speech rhythms thing is super interesting! There are definitely some sections where it seems like this is what's happening, or where putting words to a non-repeating rhythm makes it much easier to learn
hands down the most interesting music theory channel on this website
If you like stuff like this, you should check out Yogev Gabay, it slightly more drum centric and his videos are pretty entertaining.
its honestly fucking insane that these are the depths we have to go to in order to understand a dillinger riff. that’s exactly why there will never ever be a band quite like them.
You're hilariously right
This is kind of insane DEP walk away from music standards and even music rules somehow.
It's like if they practiced math, and started dividing by zero, and everyone will be cool with it.
or uh, calculating infinity
DEP played a vital part in my music journey and had a huge influence on my drumming and how I created songs. What I loved most about listening to their music is how absolutely crazy and chaotic they sound when you listen to their songs for the first few times but with each listening they kind of get more and more predictable and the chaos slowly starts to become more structured and satisfying.
Dude you deserve a lot of respect for not only breaking down insane stuff like this but also playing demonstrations of them too
Brute force memorizing them is how Billy says he learned these parts in an interview. I'm pretty sure this is spot on
HOW COULD IT ALL BEEEEEE?! WE'VE NEVER BEEN DEAD, BUT NEVER AWAKE FROM THIS DREEEAAAM~!
I love your comparison of Meshuggah and BTBAM to Dillinger. All chaotic beasts but in that sense Dillinger is its own brand!
The fact that I can follow your train of thought on this is a testament to your wonderfully succinct explanations! Thanks for making me appreciate Dillinger even more. Cheers, mate.
best music theory channel by far.
The Dillinger Escape Plan entered my life at a point where I was thristy for hearing music that pushes boundaries. I don't listen to them much anymore, though I do appreciate them and watched them on their farewell tour. But they have left a lasting influence on me musically. I at one point started producing really rhythmically complex and heavy electronic music. Which transitioned into me still producing that genre (breakcore) but rather focussing my attention on making it more noisy with interesting sound design. But in spite of those changes in style or how long ago I got into them, Dillinger's use of controlled-chaos is one of 3 major instances in my musical past that I can point to and go "this turned me into the musician I am today". And this video is an incredibly succint breakdown of why this is. Thanks!
Awesome to hear! My story is similar! When I first started trying to play their stuff I realized how much deeper the rhythmic rabbit hole could go!
Great example of a band that's mostly all feel as opposed to something set in stone. I have way more respect for bands like this the older I get. Sure technicality is impressive, but give me emotion!
No one can give u emotion but yourself. You can find some emotion in any music. While some artists are popular cause their fans get the feels hearing them some others might not.
OH MY GOD, SO I’M NOT CRAZY!! I consider myself a pretty astute rhythmic technician and it’s always drove me nuts that there are so many parts I’ve never been able to figure out even after hundreds of listens. Like you said… one of my favorite parts about their music! Awesome video, thank you!!!
Haha one of my favorite parts of this channel is making claims like this and finding out that I'm not alone in thinking this way!
Having spent a lot of time learning 2 of TDEP albums I'd say I have to agree with this interpretation of some of the riffs. I would learn the riffs from the official tabs (diligently) and then listen to the tracks themselves on loop to see exactly how that mapped to whatever they were really playing. It was a wild ride.
I would say that the Farewell Mona Lisa intro actually falls into that wild "barely playable but still sitting on a grid" tempo. I could only gauge where I was by feeling the first beat on an up stroke, or downstroke. Having an idea of whether a measure starts on an even or odd attack number really helped with some of those faster parts.
Anyway, great video! Comment essay over 😅
100% agree. DEP and this era of mathcore really feels like it's written standing in a room with a guitar strapped to the player (Ben I suppose) rather than clicked in to a daw/midi. not a knock against anyone who does the latter. But that's why this feels more punky than metally in my opinion. Edit: HAHA I REALIZED THAT BEN LITERALLY COMMENTED ON THIS VIDEO THAT'S AMAZING
I am you didn’t get to feel this part live, you never got to feel pure violence live. RIP live Dillinger.
Loved Dillinger since "Under the Running Board". The thing I love about "Prancer" is the complete swagger the song has from a band like them.
You’re unreal. An amazing analytical mind for this stuff that I wouldn’t even know where to begin to pull apart.
As someone working in the realm of natural science, I absolutley enjoy your approach of "quantifying" something that i havn't even thought of being able to be measured and described so precisely. Thanks for broadening my horizon!
Calder, it's beyond amazing to what lengths you go to analyze the stuff you talk about.
I love how nerdy and driven these things are in their core while staying completely comprehensible and not shifting into university level elitism.
Love the video as always. Can't express this enough.
Thank you so much!
That was amazing man, you are the Adam Neely of music I actually care for
So glad I found this video! found it so fascinating and always wondered the same about DEP thank you!
I don't listen that much to metal but DEP did something amazing by marrying dissonance with melody... Also Gregs voice has soul instead of constant screaming. I can only play their main simple parts, the rest is impossible for me to memorize... I just fake it or play by feel lol
This channel is great.I really nerd out on this type of stuff.
this is both a fantastic video and a reminder of why I could never really get into DEP.
I have so much appreciation for DEP after watching this...thank you man.
Jesus man, THE work ... amazing content !
I like Greg as a vocalist and think he was good fit for DEP but would have been very interested to hear an instrumental Dillinger record.
Jesus dude this is great! Most underrated channel on YT right now. Keep it up!
Thank you hero
Great analysis, I was hoping that you would do this video! I read your paper on Meshuggah and DEP, and this is just awesome!
I wasnt expecting this video to be this interesting lol
I'm so glad I got to see these guys live before they hung it up. Loving the videos, keep it up.
Well, that was interesting.... now I'll return to writing my 4/4 songs on the grid.
Best video piece I've seen on dillinger without a doubt. You succinctly encapsulated what it is that makes dillinger rhythms and riffs just so mind boggling. Love your other stuff too my man!
DEP was one of the first bands that really got me interested in mixed meter and now roughly two decades later where channels like this are opening up even wilder rhythmic concepts it's great to see that they're still relevant and able to teach me new shit, truly a legendary band for people at any level of theory knowledge.
I don't think I've seen you mention irrational time signatures yet and this "off the grid" section has me curious if you could do a video on those at some point, assuming there are any metal bands or riffs around actually using them. The explanation here of how they probably started with an additive grid and then just shifted it out of time by feel is probably correct but it does seem vaguely similar conceptually to what irrationals can do, at least in terms of creating those additive mixed meter feels that physically cannot be contained within the traditional 16th note grid. Maybe a future topic worth looking into, although finding examples is very difficult and even more so if you're trying to stick primarily to metal bands here.
Absolutely! I haven't come across any cases that I would unambiguously call irrational time signatures in my transcribing-I've been tempted by some DEP and Car Bomb stuff, but normally ultimately decided there was a simpler and more likely explanation. Would love to hear if you have any clear examples in metal though!
Loved this mate. Well done
I love all your videos and please keep doing these
Dont know if anyone mentioned this yet, but that prancer intro pattern has a gallop in the open chugs.
Listen to the drumeo playthrough and you can more clearly hear the guitars.
Awesome video!
Cheers!
Man I appreciate you so much!
Yesss ive been waiting for this
great analysis! need more please
Thank you, the world needs more of this
Man i remember trying to learn how to play this song at one point, i managed to get the intro riff down after some struggle, thought it wouldn't be too bad, then i looked at a tab and saw how the rest of the larts are even more crazy and said "nope" 😂 maybe i will have to give it another shot though.
i love this band, it'd be nice to see more on their music!
Great job.
Just a sick analysis. Great job. You explain things that I hear but have a hard time internalizing enough to share with others.
Awesome
Thank you very much for this video. I tried and tried (and failed) to learn parts like this by DEP and I wanted to do it right, so I tried to play it in a meter. I just got lost. But they way you put it, it really makes sense to me. I once asked Kevin (their second guitar player) if he has any tips for me on learning DEP Songs, since he had to learn all of them when he joined the band. If there is some kind of trick or special way to count? And he just said it is just practice, you have to memorize it. I kinda did not believe him until I saw your video. :-) BTW it would be really cool if you did an interview with Ben or Liam about your analysis. I would really like to know what they think about your approach.
The impossibility to express the riff through sheet music reminds me of a mathematical phenomenon: Irrational numbers are impossible to express in fractions. One can do an approximation as a fraction, which would corresponds to an approximation of the rhythm through some sort of signature, but it will never be truly accurate. Since irrational numbers can be expressed via an infinite continued fraction expansion, maybe one could do a similar thing for this riff.
My brain fell out of my ear 😭😭😭
If you haven’t covered Beyond Creation yet I think you’d enjoy analyzing some of their work. Check out “Fundamental Process” or “omnipresent perception
there’s really nothing special or crazy going on in either of those songs, (besides the 2/3 polymeter in Omnipresent Perception) or really any Beyond Creation song. Pretty straight forward tech death band.
Dude... Well done. All the inter-onset calculations and stuff seems extra at first but it clearly isn't. Obviously that's not readable for a performer but neither are the rhythmic values of the tab so might as well see what's really happening. This is a great example of some of the shortcomings of western notation. Keep up the amazing work. I love your stuff so far and appreciate your taste in music.
The transcriptions remind me of the challenge to reify folk music. Some things are nearly impossible to write down in 'proper' notation
Hey! I like your analysis, but I actually think of the intro/main riff to this song totally differently from what you've described. I definitely agree that Dillinger does a lot of the 3's and 2's, but to me the Prancer riff makes most sense in groups of 7. If we divide the riff into groups of 7 quarter notes (14 eighth notes) it's basically just the same pattern repeated four times displaced back and forth by an eighth note. I'll try writing it out with just "o" and "^" differentiating the low e chugs from the accents and "//" separating the groups of 7(14):
oo^ooo^^^^^ooo // ooo^ooo^^^^^oo // oo^ooo^^^^^ooo // ooo^ooo^oo^ooo
Notice that each measure has the same 13-note pattern "oo^ooo^^^^^oo" in it (except for the last one, but I still see that as following the same pattern but with some accents removed to add interest/turn around) and it alternates ending and then starting with an extra chug to get to 14. The main riff is basically just this same pattern repeated 4 times (doubled to 8 times total before "the problem") over top of a half-time 4/4 thing! As a side note, I also think the "no pulse" part does have a pulse (I hear the song starting on "3e&"), but that may just be me.
Other than that I love your analysis of "the problem" and super cool that Ben enjoyed it too :)
Hope this made sense!
verrrry cool, i was so blessed to see them on their farewell tour in my city. Trying to play along with them consistently shows me my 'skill ceiling' as a guitarist lol, Ben is a fucking genius. Love me some weird time sigs and i'd never really considered this one was, as you say, off the grid. I do, however, disagree with the intro part in particular. I can always count/feel that as fairly long beats, with the "BEEE" coming in on the.. third? iunno. Still always get lost about two seconds after that tho haha
Interesting! Yeah the farewell tour was bittersweet but sick, I saw them in Baltimore.
And that's interesting about the intro-I think the attacks don't line up on a strict metronome grid (and they change the spacing of them a little bit every time they play it live it seems), but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to hear them as beats. I think in cases like the intro it's kind of like how classical musicians hear beats, where there's a lot more elasticity to how long each one lasts, as opposed to the metronomic precision that metal (and pop and jazz etc) musicians usually feel.
I find it impossible to play any Dillinger song without looking and feeling like I want to punch someone in the face
The band that got me into heavy spastic music! I heard black bubblegum on pandora and needed more but couldn't find it
Then I saw ire works at fye and bought. Put it in and immediately turned it off cuz it was way to heavy for me. But I forced myself to listen again and again cuz I knew it was good. Pretty soon they were my favorite band.
Thanks so much for your effort!
Incredible work never saw any content on this level before.
Hope you do another video on TDEP because this is one of the bands that is really hard to figure out if you're not deep into the matter.
That probably explains the lack of videos covering them, the content offered is highly disproportionate to their popularity within "the subculture".
I'm highly interested in figuring out some of the parts from "When good dogs do bad things" or "party smasher" :D
Anybody with me?
You're smart folks. I know that everyone bombards you with requests/suggestions... but I would really like to see a Dysrhythmia analysis.
Or Sleepytime Gorilla Museum...
Measuring interonset intervals is definitely useful for analyzing complex rhythms, but I have to wonder if this usefulness is limited by the accuracy of the performers. The measurable difference between, say, a dotted eighth note (187.5 ms) and a quarter note quintuplet (200 ms) is sufficiently small for the listener's interpretation to be informed more by other supporting rhythmic cues than by accuracy. But this doesn't necessarily mean the rhythm is 'gridless' - if the musician's interpretation and the listener's interpretation line up, then there is a de facto mental grid even if the data don't bear it out. Though in the case of 'Prancer' I think that the listener's inability to identify clear patterns is simply what makes the song 'gridless'.
There are a couple of songs from other metal bands that have have rhythms I'd describe as possibly gridless, irrational, feel-based, etc. but haven't been able to conclusively interpret myself, if you wanted to check them out. One is Helium Horse Fly's 'In a Deathless Spell', particularly the section starting at 8:30. Another is Kayo Dot's 'Thief' (in the section starting at 0:54 for instance, but also throughout the song).
For sure! Definitely some details here to still be worked out, and tbh I'm not entirely sold on using the spectrogram precise measuring stuff, partly for the reasons you mention-it's a fun exercise, and I was a little more rigorous in setting up controls etc. in the paper this is based on, but I think I'd have to do this with a bunch of live recordings to really get a feel for what the variations are (hard to do because live recording quality doesn't lend itself as nicely to spectrograms), and do some more for the rest of the song to get a better idea of what the variation is in sections with a clear consistent grid (I used the quarter note section as a control in the paper, but probably should do more). Still a lot to think about! My dissertation research, if all goes as planned, will use some motion capture stuff to shed some more light on sections like these. Thanks for the comments! Love Kayo Dot, I'll have to check those examples out!
Amazing analysis as always. I'd love to hear your analysis of Their Dogs Were Astronauts - Contortionist
Am old person and don't know how to link, but it's on UA-cam
Thanks man, keep it up!
I would love to see a video of phantom by them as well!
@@arijitmazumdar5740 they do such groovy confusing jams with such simple elements, blew my mind first time I heard them
let's hear more of your band
www.floridekstasis.bandcamp.com
Could you do a video about the band Pathogen?
Very cool, I think a big part of the reason TDEP don't quite line up with the lenses that you've used (to great effect!) on other metal bands is that they come from more of a hardcore punk idiom and thus have a distinctly different approach to rhythm/tempo etc. Just a thought, great work as always!
Absolutely!
Great explanation. I would have liked to see more going through the chart of time values against the different transcriptions, but that's probably not as interesting to most people, lol. Glad you got to a bit of the similarity with Car Bomb here in your conclusion, with the performers' 'felt pulse' taking a step back from the microtimings and just focusing on durations of the gestures. I feel like there's very fertile ground for comparison there, the main textural difference I can think of being that Dillinger pretty much always has drums filling in 32nd notes behind the rhythms (although they probably vary in speed within sections) - there's a somewhat rigid glue there, vs Car Bomb where the drums are often stretching time by playing really loose &/ implying new tempi over sections with atypical rhythms that are more in the realm of a tactus note length than DEP's very un-feel-able 32nds.
Great points! Absolutely! Would kill to see a conversation between Billy and Elliot...
SYSC! Saw them at a tiny tattoo parlor in tampa
I'll still never quite nail this song. That section is one of the weirdest things I've ever learned haha.
You’re getting more comfortable speaking in front of the camera. Great progress!
Gotta love your take on this one, one thing that could help understand those time signatures is the artists takes, for example Billy Rymer interprets these just not by numbers but like phrases as a language as this video he explains ua-cam.com/video/BiHjRk59cxw/v-deo.html anyways, great content as always, very much appreciated
For sure! I think the language angle will be very helpful as I keep developing this stuff!
Have you considered taking look at any songs by Frontierer? Not necessarily DEP level insanity but still a very aggressive and chaotic sonic assault.
I would say frontierer is crazier? lol
Been working up the nerve to start transcribing their stuff for a while, will get to it before too long!
Please do more Car Bomb (can’t remember if you did one already). They do tons of this stuff , although I personally feel their music is a tad easier to analyze
Got a long video on them, will eventually do more for sure!
they planned to escape for so long. did they ever make it?
They finally got out! That's why they're not playing shows anymore!
All true but I think the guitarist actually fast picks triplets for all the Prancer intro chords
i’m gonna need a software developer for my next song
I'm not a "real" musician so this is just a "throwing it out there", but is the grid so varying that it could not be explained with a per bar/couple of bars tempo/time signature change?
Wait, why are you playing all of Prancer's intro in quarter notes when he's doing quite a lot of triplets in there too?
A few people pointed this out-those gallops are hard to hear and I didn't pay much attention to live videos when I was learning, and I went back and check and the "official" tab book from Sheet Happens has it written how I played it (all eighth notes), which is what I learned from.
Which is not the only mistake in this particular tab book (like I say in the video, the way they transcribe the chaotic part is pretty wonky too). These books are ostensibly put together with input from the artists (though they didn't make their own tabs for this), and I think it goes to show Ben and/or Liam probably didn't proofread it that closely...
In the intro they play galloping riff on E string in-between the maj7 interval stabs, it can pretty easily be heard and makes this part more complex and more fun to play than what you've played. As to the part you talk about in this video this is the only part of the song I can't quite figure out, and sadly, while interesting to watch, your video didn't help much in that regard. Also, while I'm at it I, actually imagine this part as weird tuplets, but I'm not as versed in counting rhythm as you so as to know what those tuplets would have been. Maybe there's something to that idea.
Oh I haven't seen any tabs that say those are gallops and don't hear it that way (if we're talking about the same part), but might be. And yeah common misconception is that my videos are supposed to help people play these riffs, which is not my main goal-much more on the music theory side than the guitar lesson side. This riff especially I don't think there's any easy way to learn it, you just have to play it a million times with the recording.
As for the tuplets, there are a lot of ways you could notate this, and of course with complicated enough tuplets you can "accurately" notate anything. But the point still stands about it being too fast for them to really feel like tuplets. Thanks for watching!
Have you ever used the program Transcribe? I use it to learn songs by ear and its really useful for complex songs and also songs without any tabs or sheet music available at all.
I lack the jargon, but I hear a clear background beat in the intro. It's far slower than what you've shown on the video.
...this is not a rocket science.....this is not a music theory.....this is pire math.....
Analysis of the fake DEP! i want to sleep!