How did Drumkit from Hell come about and how did you go about creating it?

There’s a bit of a misconception with my role in that actually. At the time (this was mid-90’s) we were still writing with R5 drum machines, using porta-studios and stuff like that, but eventually, recording on computers started becoming more common. Fredrik was the main instigator of pretty much the whole project. He wanted to create high quality samples so that you could program realistic sounding drums.

What you do is basically go into a studio and rig microphones onto the kit as if you were recording an album. The only real difference is that instead of playing tracks, you play hits. You’ll do different strength (velocity) hits from a very soft tap to a very strong hit, and you do maybe a few of each.

On later releases there’s even distinction between left and right hand hits, so you can actually write a fill with right and left hand playing. But since you record all these samples one hit at a time it’s a very tedious and time consuming process. You sit there with headphones on and you tap a cymbal real softly and you let it ring out completely. Then you hit it a little harder and let that ring out… etc

By now they’ve got it to the point where it’s sounding great. They’ve been doing it in great sounding drum rooms all over the world, pretty much, or at least the good ones in the States. For example, Avatar, Hit Factory, (before they turned to rubble) some places down in Tennessee I think - all of those really great sounding drum rooms – And they’ve sampled not just rock and metal drums - which we started with. Nowadays they’ve done percussion, jazz drums, big boomy Bonham-like kits, and pretty much anything else, so its kinda taken off so much from what we started doing and I was kinda only briefly involved with it in the beginning, and maybe on occasion a few times after that.

We’re actually doing a new one in December. We’re recording at Studio Atlantis in Stockholm which is another great sounding drum room, so were gonna do a brand new one that’s more related to rock and metal.

Who are you listening to at the moment and who are you drawing your inspiration from?

Well, music for me is… I’m a very periodic listener to musical role. When I listen to music now it might be anything "old-school" like Judas Priest or it could be more electronic related stuff like Cornelius from Japan… It could be Squarepusher, it could be Pantera. It could be pretty much anything, you know? There are always a few bands that I come back to, that I have always listened to since my adolescent years. Bands like Rush and Pink Floyd, but a apart from those two I don’t really have a favorite, per se. Tool is another band that I also keep coming back to as well.

Tell me a little bit about Meshuggah’s songwriting methods and in particular, Fredrik’s role/influence in how you construct your parts.

Actually, I think that there’s a misconception as far as this goes. The drums in our band of course feature very heavily and it’s very rhythmically structured a lot of the time, I think. The misconception is that me (as a drummer) would write the drum parts.

Usually, whoever writes the song, writes the drum part. On any given album Id say I’ve written about 15-20 percent of the whole drum parts on that album. The rest has been written by whoever wrote the riffs for that track. The other guys - Fredrik especially, but Marten and Jens too - have a very good drummers sense. They never program weird stuff that you couldn’t physically play. It can be hard to learn but there’s always a natural flow to their programming. Then I learnt it.

We don’t really jam up anything any more, either. It’s more like sitting at the computer, pushing the record button and getting down a rhythmic idea - which might stem from the drums, instead of starting from the more standard ‘rock’ way, building from a guitar riff – We’ll then develop it back and forth from there.

What’s the hardest Meshuggah song you’ve had to learn?

Bleed! Just because I really had to change the approach to how I played the kick drums. It’s not the structure of the songs I found difficult, nor was it the evolution of the patterns or cycles. To be able to play the basic pattern fluidly and comfortably up to speed was difficult.

As a drummer, what do you feel you do well and what do you wish you could do better?

There are definitely things I can think of. For some reason, on every tour, the further into the tour, after say 3 or four weeks, my legs get worse and worse. I’m not sure if it’s related to my sciatic nerve. I have some back issues occasionally which require going back and forth to the chiropractor and seeing physical trainers, etc. Sometimes I have problems with my feet…

Like a pain type of thing?

No, no. Not really. It’s just… my feet wont play what my brain is telling them, you know? But it’s usually not so bad that the crowd notice, its more like the way I’m feeling behind the kit… a confidence thing – Like I really need to convince my feet to play the parts. So that’s how I feel sometimes?

Your footwork on Bleed is incredible! Could you give some insight to drummers looking to improve their footwork?

Err…Umm…Its really hard to give tips on that because for me its always been related to learning a certain song and I don’t really analyze what I’m doing apart from knowing that this is the way to make the song sound and this is what I have to learn. So I play the song and I don’t have practice routines outside of me rehearsing the music. I don’t really practice drums on the side very much. The decent practice that I get is for each album when I have to learn the new songs.

My settings are very typical Id say. I don’t have a really long or short beater throw. It’s like a 45 degree angle. The spring tension is I guess medium, you know. To me it’s a matter of what kind of beaters I use and stuff like that. I do have the kick drum very heavily muffled, I hate it when I have any kind of bounce in the kick head, because I’m one of those guys that really plants the beater into the head. It’s different for everyone f course, but the deadened head helps me.

Are you triggering live?

For Bleed only. They still sound like kick drums, you know… and I use mic's for everything else. Remember that I have very deadened kicks, so the triggering helps with the definition of the notes.

Do you guys lock yourselves away for period of time when you prepare for albums?

Yeah. Months and month’s on-end. When we start writing and we go into that mode, it’s usually around 6 months to a year of more or less shutting everything else out and just focusing on the task at hand. Three of us still live in Stockholm. Marten just moved back up North about a year ago and we haven’t really tried writing an album since he moved up but I’m pretty sure once we start writing again, he’ll be down in the studio with us - down for two weeks and back up for one, and so on. It will still be a pretty focused time I think.

The downfall of some large labels recently and the increase in internet downloading has completely redefined the way we access music these days. Some would claim it’s the beginning of the end, where others relish the idea of larger labels meeting their demise. What’s does your label do for you and how do you feel about the whole situation, personally?

It’s really hard to know. For a band of our size, which is still on the smaller scale of things, compared to major artists, I think we may still benefit from the downloading thing. Just from the amount of spreading online. Of course its getting harder and harder for bands to get the kind of record contracts you used to see in the 90’s, you know… Where you’d get huge sums of money and stuff like that. I think that bands nowadays really need to rely upon other avenues as well as coming up with cool merchandise. Bands have to tour, pretty much – You cant just write cool songs and think that you’re gonna make a fortune out of that.

Overall, It’s really hard to say how I feel about it. I mean, our sales have gone down with that as well, but we’ve been lucky. We still sold more of the new album than any of the other previous albums, so that’s a very good indication for us that there’s a lot of downloading going on. If this had been seven or eight years ago the album would have been doing supremely well, Having said that, were lucky to be in the metal community, because I think the downloading thing is a lot worse in the more mainstream areas. I still find that most metal fans tend to want to have physical covers, and the artwork, the lyrics – the whole package, you know? They want the product in their hand. Even if they download it, they’re still going to go out and buy it – At least, that’s what I believe it’s like for the metal guys. I guess that’s also why some labels, like Nuclear Blast are still going strong, because their clientele is a more loyal market.

What’s the best show you’ve played, and what has made it great?

Oh… difficult!

Probably one of the shows where we opened for Tool, just cause it’s a crazy setting - Huge arenas everyday and some massive shows, but that’s still technically opening for another band. As far as playing our own shows is concerned, Id say some of the recent Australian shows have been some of the greatest that we have played as far as the crowd response and size. Both Sydney, Melbourne… Actually all the shows in Australia have been really, really good. We’ve done a few in Denver, Colorado. I remember the last time was a really good show, too. You freak out!

Favourite food?

Fast and greasy…

Favorite movie?

Oh its gotta be… Oh, hold on… *long pause*… Ah what’s it called again It’s a Japanese movie…So trippy its not even funny…Nah I can’t remember!

Err…Is it an animation?

No… I’m so sorry I can’t come up with the name of it.

Your number one tip for coping with a schedule as busy as yours?

Try to sleep whenever you can. That’s probably the most important thing. It really wears you down if you don’t. Some people can go with just four hours of sleep, but after weeks it wears you down so get plenty of sleep!

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