There is a special kind of humility that arrives the moment you try to play Meshuggah and discover that your pinky, that little freeloader you have been carrying for years, actually has a job to do. I sat down with "In Death Is Death," pressed record, and within four bars my fretting hand filed a formal complaint. No cheating. No lazy pinky. No party.
This clip is a short, honest look at the main riff from Meshuggah's "In Death Is Death" — the kind of low, chugging, seven-string djent pattern that looks like three notes and feels like a spider doing calisthenics. It is one minute of me discovering that finger independence is not optional when Fredrik Thordendal is involved.
How this four-finger riff really works
The trick to a Meshuggah riff like "In Death Is Death" is that it refuses to let you fake it. Most rock riffs let you park on index and middle and coast; this one spreads chromatic-ish fragments across the low strings so that each finger — index, middle, ring, and yes, the pinky — has to fret, mute, and release on its own beat. That is finger independence in its rawest form: four fingers moving to four different instructions at the same time, while your palm keeps everything else dead quiet. Slow it to a crawl, keep every note clean with tight palm mutes, and only then push the tempo. Rushing this teaches your hand the wrong pattern beautifully well.
The concrete takeaway: assign a finger to a fret and never renegotiate. If a note sits on fret 4, the pinky owns it — full stop. The moment you let your ring finger "help out," the groove smears and Meshuggah's whole clockwork feel collapses. And because this band lives in shifting accents, it pays to know what a time signature actually is before you try to headbang in the right place.
If your pinky has now unionized and is demanding hazard pay, I completely understand — I am negotiating with mine too, one riff at a time, over on Patreon.