He may be one of the most renowned drummers in the world and led one of the planet’s biggest rock bands of the last three decades, but Dave Grohl has admitted he can’t count time signatures.
The lead Foo Fighter was appearing on the Tape Notes podcast when he let slip this somewhat startling revelation. “I know it sounds horrible. I’m a drummer. It’s funny because people count things… differently,” he told host John Kennedy, before illustrating it with a story.
It seems that he only found this out when he guested on a Nine Inch Nails session. “The riff was like [mimes complicated time signature] and I’d go in and do a take and Trent (Reznor) and Atticus (Ross) were there and they’d say ‘ok let’s do one more take but make sure you hit a crash on the one’.
Grohl said ok and performed the drum pattern again. “Then I’d do another take and they’d be like ‘ok great, just one more but get the crash on the one’”.
It was only on the third take that both parties realised they were communicating at cross purposes.
“They’re like ‘come in here’. (I) walk in the control room and they’re like ‘tell me where you think the one is?’” Grohl tells them and Reznor and Ross start laughing. “(They said) ‘That’s not the one. The one’s here’. And it was on some weird side note thing that f***ed me up. Like I was so confused.”
“And so I was like, that’s not my one. As long as I recognise the pattern, just tell me where to put the cymbal, I’ll put it there. But I’ve got my own one.”
Grohl no doubt survived Nine Inch Nails’ derision; his own approach to time signatures hasn’t exactly proved an impediment during a long and illustrious career. “You know it’s hard to un-see something; it’s also hard to un-hear something,” he reflected to Kennedy. “So it’s hard to un-hear the one. It’s hard to put it somewhere else.”
