Recording & playing 'in the moment'

I stumbled across this video a while back looking for recording videos. This is an interview with Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Bob Rock discussing how the drums were recorded on Metallica's 'black' album. There were a few very strong points from the interview. - Yes, we can learn from Metallica. -






Point one. The drums were tracked in many, many takes and spliced together. The band recognized that Lars could not maintain the level of intensity they wanted for an entire song. Lars wanted to take the thought out of what he was doing and just 'play' and be 'in the moment.' Let's recognize that Metallica plays more in one tour than most of us will play in a lifetime. They've been doing it for better than 15 years. Why would it be difficult for any of them to play a single track in its entirety? Because it is not that easy. Stare at something in the room you are in now. Think of nothing but that object. How long until you notice something else in the room or your thoughts drift away? Likely not long.

Can weekend warriors and beginning students expect to play with this level of focus? Probably not. Can they learn? I believe it is possible. Take a look at a book called, "The Inner Game of Music." It applies sports psychology to music. We can learn to play our absolute best, just like Metallica or your favorite athlete.

Metallica tracked one portion of the song at a time. When they were done, they spent countless hours sifting through the sections, picking the best take for the song. This brings us to point two. What we hear on our CDs is the absolute best take (or composite take) out of who knows how many days. There was a tremendous amount of work that went into making something sound so natural and raw. It is easy to miss how much work went into each song.

The average player needs to realize it may not be easy to immediately copy part of a song. Even once the individual notes are copied, the feel and attitude of the song could still be missing. Refer back to point one. Attitude is a huge component of music performance.

Point three. Metallica used 40-50 mics for the drums and ultimately about 20 individual tracks. Again, a lot of hard work to make a song sound so natural. The average musician is not going to sound exactly like a recording. We don't have the same equipment, the same recording studio, engineers, etc... And we're also different people playing differently.

And our last point. Bob Rock commented that Lars plays to the music. He doesn't just play through a song. He plays to/with the song from deep down inside. This is something we could all examine in our own playing. Do we play the song or do we really play the song? Do we play our instruments or do we really play our instruments? It's all about feel. It's about soul.