Metal School

Glad to see you roaming your old stomping grounds! And good luck & Godspeed on the Npmusic front!

FWIW, I'm still playing my twangers, and still just for my personal enjoyment. Umbran has picked up the 6-string bug recently, too.

The oddest bit, though: my 68 year old mom sooooo badly wanted to see Aerosmith- a band she has loved since their reunion in the late 1980s- that she bought tickets and demanded I take her. (She doesn't see well at night, and dad doesn't do hard rock at all.) Opening act, Slash, was a bit of a mystery to her, but she recognized a couple of his pieces. And since that concert, she got exposed to a couple of the tamer Opeth CDs I had in my car...and she bought her own copies.

Dannyalcatraz said:

<SNIP> And since that concert, she got exposed to a couple of the tamer Opeth CDs I had in my car...and she bought her own copies.

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*sniff* NO I'M NOT CRYING!!!! I just have something in my eye... beautiful man beautiful...

And thanks for the well wishes, I keep thinking in the back of my mind would X like it (where X is a person I know and have either played or discussed music with) you are on that list bra.

What kind of genre are you and your crew aiming for?

And, of course, if you send me links to stuff you record, I'll be happy to give constructive criticism.

Prog inspired metal - what else? It's kind of all over the metal/hard rock spectrum since both Daryl, and I like a lot of the same stuff everything from Queensryche to Journey. We cut our teeth on Van Halen and progressed into Pretty Maids before I left for the Military. So melodic or experimental makes no difference and subject matter is all over the map. We have songs dealing with alcoholic parenting revenge, depression, postpartum baby drowning and religious hypocrisy; so you know, the usual.

Holy shamoley, they're back! My favorite industrial metal band of all time!
http://www.metalobsession.net/2014/...-an-interview-with-justin-broadrick-godflesh/

...which reminds me: Thunderfoot (or anyone else), is there an app or something I can feed a song into to have it create sheet music or tab for? I am trying to take the rhythm from Godflesh's song "Pure", Primus' "My Name is Mud", Chemical Brothers' "Setting Sun" and some other oddball tunes to use for practicing/composing Surf guitar to.

(Nuts, I know, but...)

So sorry I missed this, yes there is a program, (I think), no I don't know the name of it, but my guitar player has something that he uses that analyzes songs and drops chord patterns and key changes, so at the very least I'll get that to you in a couple of weeks (when he comes back home off he river.)

Danke!

I just seriously got back into the guitar after a long period of casual play (prior to which I had been heavily involved in bands, song writing and learning about music). One thing I've discovered is some of the old stuff stuck or just needs a quick refresher (relearning how to read music is pretty smooth, but my rhythm is almost completely gone and needs major calibration). Almost no recollection of modes. So I just said screw it and started with square one all over again, going through all the basics again from the ground up just to fill in any gaps or remove wrong assumptions I've developed over the years.

What is incredible is how easy this is to do these days with youtube and other online resources. When I was a kid, you had to learn from your guitar teacher and books (most of which were total crap and strained to explain concepts clearly). So it was a process where you were very reliant upon other people. Now this stuff is all up online. And if you need feedback or lessons from a pro, those can be done by Skype.

I tend to be a pretty intuitive player, but still find music theory incredibly helpful (at the very least, being able to write stuff down in notation is handy). I've always liked bands like King Diamond, Iron Maiden, and guitarists like Randy Rhoads. The theory seems to work well with those styles. But I was always into heavier and slower stuff as well, like Cathedral, Candlemass, Bolt Thrower, and many other bands on the melodic end of the Death/Doom spectrum. For that music theory can be handy (candlemas definitely has a neoclassical vibe) but you can also just arrive there through intuition. I'm Curious what other peoples experiences are with music theory and metal; how they feel it fits in.

Even though I grew up in and around music, I've always been more of an intuitive player. Not that I can't see the value of theory, I'm just not disciplined.

And metal can be VERY technical, so music theory's benefits are obvious.

Dannyalcatraz said:

Even though I grew up in and around music, I've always been more of an intuitive player. Not that I can't see the value of theory, I'm just not disciplined.

And metal can be VERY technical, so music theory's benefits are obvious.

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I was an 'okay' pupil when it came to music theory. I wouldn't say I excelled, and I wouldn't say I was enamored with it, but I picked it up enough that I could get by. Some of it is just having the right teacher. My first two guitar teachers bored me to tears with music theory and one of them made me hate it for a while (because he always brought it back to reggae for some reason, and I just wasn't able to connect with that style of music). But the the teacher who came next and sort of stuck around for long time, figured out how to find stuff that I could connect with. He basically saw the connection between the metal I was listening to and baroque music. So he got me to practice reading sheet music by giving me Bach pieces to play. So I think it is just one of those things where, when it is presented i the right way, it is a lot easier to digest. I always liked breaking the rules and my teacher was one of these instructors who taught me we learn the rules so we know what we are doing when we break them. Still I am surprised how much I thought I absorbed and really didn't. How many rules I am breaking simply because I don't know the rules. The mentality was just the right fit for me (I was not learning rules to be another stuffy, uptight player, I was learning the rules so we could break things). Still I am surprised by how many gaps there are in my knowledge now. I think I knew a lot of technique, but was missing foundational bits of knowledge (or I just got rusty). So that is why I am building again from the ground up.

I am sort of split. I have a fairly intuitive style but it is largely emulating players who have a good grounding in theory. I think there is a spectrum and players need to find for themselves where they fit most. Personally I like technical players, but I also find that some players get so caught up in theory and technique that they lose of a bit of the soul. I think things can get sloppy if its all feeling and no technique or theory (or at least a bit dull) but it can swing the other way too. So for me as a listener it is about balance more than anything else. There are some amazing guitar players out there, who frankly can't write a memorable melodic line to save their lives (everything works in theory but it never comes to together or leaves a lasting impression). So I think intuition is also very important.