These 2 artists (Tony Mcalbine and Jason Becker) also fit into what I just said to Zoot Allures, sorry. Just like Yngwie malmsteen who has played guitar all his life, can't write music, only ego stroking "improvisation". They desperately need to be in the spotlight and center of the attention in every second of the song, their egos demand it, god forbid if somebody doesn't notice that they are good at playing guitar. So the point of these songs are to show off their skills, not tell a story or to create atmosphere, they are the center of their songs, the songs are about worshipping the guitarist...
I disagree (about Tony and Jason)... music can be complex and not ego stroking. A composition can be complex but seem excessive (like the video zoot posted) or it can be complex but coherent, not so overfull that you have no sense of where you are.
You don't even like "Far Beyond the Sun" by Malmsteen?
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Jarno
Gender : Posts : 2282 Join date : 2015-08-27 Age : 32 Location : Finland
You don't even like "Far Beyond the Sun" by Malmsteen?
I tried it now, but I've heard it before... There are no tempo changes, pauses or acceleration etc, he might as well just play to the beat of a metronome, It's not hard to memorize song, learning to play this song is only dependent on playing those fast arpeggios, which for me sounds like unnecessary filler.
So I think "complex" is too big word for it, as if this elevates it above other music just because he has to show off.
Yeah there was a point when the decade of lead guitar came to an end but they all refused to put their guitars down. Guitarists like Satriani and Vai pretty much concluded that period. Anything post-Satriani/Vai in lead guitar is uninteresting or at already happened.
But you shouldn't be so hard on lead guitar. It is a skill set and musicians are proud of having those skills. The problem is those few guitarists who really are arrogant ass rangers, but also excellent guitarists. These are anomalies; being that good should make it okay for you to not be an ass ranger, and yet still you are an ass ranger.
When a skilled musician becomes an asshole by virtue of his being that good with an instrument, he either misinterprets his own power and fails to notice he is in no need of pretentiousness, or holds the value of being a skilled musician in very low esteem. He does it so easily, almost mocks it, "yeah I can shred, so what."
I don't like that attitude because it reveals that the skilled guitarist with this attitude is nervous because he is a good guitarist. It's like he knows he's doing something cheesy; dressed in lord of the rings clothes, standing in front of a big fan with his long hair blowing behind him, shredding a transparent electric Ibanez guitar with blinking lights in it during the video solo shoot.
If that was part of your job, you almost had to become an asshole, right? You'd feel so guilty for having to do such a stupid thing, you's need to pretend you really would want to do such a thing, so you become that turkey with the guitar kneeling on a stage under a blinking purple strobe light, firing off machine leads on a guitar you pretend to be humping.
If you want to see into the intentions and motivations of a musician, watch a video he/she is in. What he/she does in that video speaks volumes about his/her authenticity. Is an ugly menacing freak jumping around and acting like a monkey, or does he/she stand there and play his/her instrument. To some degree an amount of histrionics is necessary in one's role on stage as the singer, but not so with musicians. Drummers who bang their heads up and down while they play; red flag. Bands that always try to create a horrific dramatic effect to set the theme of the music. Skulls, darkness, death, war, destruction.. seditious thoughts in general.
When a metal band can write a good instrumental song, that says something about them. All else is too formulaic. What they are doing in videos is a most important first impression too.
You see the same kind of cinimatic stuff going on in that video as you see in Tool videos, and there is a reason for this. You always see a strange, growing alien creature or something.. or an alien humanoid trapped in a grey cell scratching at the walls, or some weird alien landscape.
Why.
Because the age of the poltical content in music videos is over. We can't go back to the Megadeth days.. System of a Down and what's that band with that obnoxious dude who's all 'fuck that I won't do what cha tell me!'. Fuck I can never remember the name of that band.
Also the music is different commpositionally, so this dramatic symbolism of the alien is used to express the strange new areas created by bands like Animals as Leaders, Meshuggah, and Tool. This new kind of polyrhythmic form and odd time meter... the age when the fusion approach was taken to metal. Whenever a music genre experiences a fusion revolution, it maxes out and stops growing. I don't mean fusion as in the careless, wanton mixing of superfluous samples of pregenerated music on a software program or some DJ at a party who's doing a 'fusion dance mix', and so blends the change over between the songs of the techno house music genre he is doing on his turn tables.
A fusion revolution happens to a genre when the best minds and musicians get together and push the technical limits of what the genre can do. The last great push occurred when it became polyrhythmic and became instrumental. Check out the older Ozric Tentacles stuff.
Formulaic means using old designs for writing a piece of music. A genre will stablize for short period and then a few great bands will come out from underneath the mass of mainstream crap and redefine the characteristics of the genre. From that point forward, a new limit is set and unless the genre undergoes a new spontaneous change again, it exists within that set limit.
Incidentally, nothing else can be done with the music. The Metallica and Slayer days begot that era of ridiculous death metal garbage that Eyebrows likes so much.. with those growling idiots on vocals.
For fifteen fuckin' years any new heavy metal song that came out sounded exactly like the ones that came before it. You younger people didn't experience this musicnomic depression. It was terrible. In those days we had to be happy with what we had to be happy with...
Zoot, that metal video you posted is rubbish. It's just a bunch of repetitive syncopated arpeggios...even trance is more interesting than that. "Open to interpretation" you say...you are right, its formless, grating noise with no personality.
Classical music is rubbish, because it's in 4/4...right Zoot?
Objection your honor. She's concealing allegations in the form of a question. Ad judacio obscuratio. I never said that. What I said at some particular point was "... it's in 4/4.. I can't bear to listen to it".. a comment made about a rock song video I had just skimmed through.
I made no general or particular existential statements about any classical music, nor could my words lead anyone to conclude that I couldn't bear to listen to any music in 4/4 or even enjoy it, because there were no existential quantifiers in any of my statements. Look at only what I said, your honor, not at what I did not say. This incrimination is unwarranted. I made no such statement. She's trying to persuade the jury.
Incidentally, nothing else can be done with the music. The Metallica and Slayer days begot that era of ridiculous death metal garbage that Eyebrows likes so much.. with those growling idiots on vocals.
Well yeah, if the band/genre sounds good I always try to find as many similiar bands as possible, nothing bad about that...You don't always have to be "pushing the limits" just choose the theme for your music and stick to the essence, many bands fail just because they try to be everything at once..
Changing the sound too much just puts the band into another sub-genre...
I've been listening death/doom/blackened death metal/black metal daily for 8 years at least, but I don't try to get other people into it. It's just my own guilty pleasure because I enjoy the darkness/brutality/rawness, I share it with others who are into it, this way the bands also get the "elitist" treatment, other bands takes longer time to get into and are rewarding in the end and some bands just never grow on you or are missing something essential.
I don't consider metal/rock music as "high-art" and I can't stand most of the musicians (of any genre), its just sub-culture, I don't really care how much "creativity" is shown in these genres, it doesn't change the fact that we live in decline, not in golden age. Even if you prove that music you listen is more "complex" and "creative" than the other person it doesn't really help the situation, but when it to comes music from real cultures (music that truly represents the essence of certain folk), then the essence and identity actually matters. Metal/rock is global.
I would gladly give up my "degenerate" music for someone who would cleanse this world/streets like in the 30-40's. but this is a topic for another thread. I don't honestly think this music (electric guitar) no matter how complex it tries to be is worth anything in the end...
Last edited by Jarno on Mon Sep 07, 2015 4:22 pm; edited 1 time in total
For those who cannot hear and need to be told, this is the end of the evolution of metal. This is to metal what fusion was to contemporary jazz.
Polyrhythmic 'math' metal as it is sometimes called, is the most compositionally complex form this kind of music can take. It's structural limits are reached here; metal is either simpler than this and therefore outmoded, or only as good as this. But metal can go no further than this. That is what I mean.
You conflate musical talent with technical skill. For musical idiots/posers, music ceases being an art, a form of expression, and becomes a sport competition of who will write a more complex song and play the most notes per minute where structure/complexity > message/expression.
You conflate musical talent with technical skill. For musical idiots/posers, music ceases being an art, a form of expression, and becomes a sport competition of who will write a more complex song and play the most notes per minute where structure/complexity > message/expression.
Yes, it happens, which is why it has to be ignored to reach an objective conclusion about the definition of 'better' musician.. to the best of our ability. Personal intentions and motivations need to be ruled out and the technical skill of the musician brought to question only. So here's how you do it. You ask can guitarist A learn to play what guitarist B knows faster than guitarist B can learn to play what guitarist A knows. That is the only thing that matters. All other comparisons and judgments like 'the music he writes is better' or 'this song is better than that song' are unfalsifiable..depends on the opinions of the listener, etc.
The only thing left after we remove all the subjective evaluations from the judgment of a musicians qualities, is the simple skill of the musician.
Musician A can play everything musician B can play and then some. Musician B cannot do this. Doesn't matter if musician B wrote all the love songs you like.. that's irrelevant, because the next guy says he hates love songs, and his opinion is no less true than yours.
The problem here is not with soloing and lead instruments in songs per se, but doing it excessively. The typical structure of a rock song was the same for about two decades after the Black Sabbath Zeppelin days in classic rock to the Metallica period in heavy metal. It was all the same. We play this for eight measures, then Tommy solos for four minutes. We do the chorus and then the melody for sixteen more measures and Tommy will solo out at the end.
In these formats, solos are mostly used as space fillers, to make the song long enough to be a song on an album. Normally, a solo is built around a song, not a song around a solo. The guitarist doesn't contribute to the writing of the song with the intentions of using it to solo over usually. But shredders like Steve Vai will write songs around solos because that's what he does; shreds. Still he is perfectly able to play a normal song with no leads in it. For commercial purposes then the Steve Vai bands will be put together to showcase his guitar skill and there will be a lot of soloing. There is a market for shredders in the music industry. After the Shawn Lane period, the fat bastard who could roll out jazz-metal scales of individual 128th notes in leads of inhuman, blistering speed, nothing more was done on the frontiers of metal. It had gone fusion, and that was that for metal. Now we are sick of soloing, and rightfully so.
You ask can guitarist A learn to play what guitarist B knows faster than guitarist B can learn to play what guitarist A knows. That is the only thing that matters.
Technical skill has nothing to do with art or music. It is pure sport, a competition. The fact that it's easily measurable and thus convenient to use as a measure for something doesn't mean it should be used as a measure for something it has nothing to do with, like artistic value.
_________________ "WOMEN BAD, CHURCH GOOD, NIGGERS BAD, WHITE GOOD, EUROPE CUCKED, PATRARCHY GOOD, ARISTOCRACY GOOD, DEMOCRACY BAD" - polishyouth
If you like that trance fusion music with those extended grooves and jam parts then you should climb the yumyum tree so you don't fall asleep or become stupid.
The stuff they are selling at the clubs and on the radio will cause you to lose IQ points. This will increase your mental agility and the landscape by at least fifteen percent.. thoughts come on faster feet and wings.. sounds become things and forms and and are put behind your ideas as if by themesis. This is philosophy soundtrack, folks. I wouldn't dare ask you to listen to classical again.. we are moving forward.
Today, you want to listen to something that is kept going with real instrument tracks rather than what industrio-trance fusion house music is doing; reducing everything to pre-recorded samples or tracks, and mixed digitally rather than ever actually played. There is very little human element in that music.
Don't lose that integrity folks because it's all you have left. Modern music is trying to make the musician superfluous. Don't start liking purely electronic music.. for the sake of the artist if nothing else.
Here are our terms. If you are a band and you don't have a drummer or a bassist or guitarist of some kind, you aren't a band. You're just a group of people fiddling with some software who all get a piece of the money when their recordings sell.
If you can't do a tour, you aren't a band either.. but not all bands tour. Some fake bands tour and put dancers and fake musicians on the stage to dance around while the pre-recorded music plays.
It's time to take a stand as a consumer and stop listening to music that musicians with instruments didn't create.
Fight for the renewed fusion revolution in modern electronic instrumental music today.
I agree with this, but this Ozric Tentacles sounds like background music 17:53 it goes reggae...Also I have never met a person who was into chillout music and wasn't using some substance.
Zoot Allures wrote:
Here are our terms. If you are a band and you don't have a drummer or a bassist or guitarist of some kind, you aren't a band. You're just a group of people fiddling with some software who all get a piece of the money when their recordings sell.
If you can't do a tour, you aren't a band either.. but not all bands tour. Some fake bands tour and put dancers and fake musicians on the stage to dance around while the pre-recorded music plays.
Arditezza
Gender : Posts : 274 Join date : 2014-11-20 Age : 52 Location : Midwest
I agree with this, but this Ozric Tentacles sounds like background music 17:53 it goes reggae...Also I have never met a person who was into chillout music and wasn't using some substance.
I like chillout music when I am throwing pottery on the wheel, or when I am reading. I find it keeps out externally irritating noise and helps me focus and create in a more fluid way. I do not use any mind-altering substances.
I also listen to a lot of binaural music, specifically by J.S. Epperson. I find it soothing and non-distracting but it must be listened to on headphones. I don't believe in all the nonsense about binaural sound being able to heal things, but I definitely think it affects my ability to concentrate and focus as well as certain ranges helping me to sleep better at night. You have to be careful because some of the available binaural soundtracks also have hidden subliminal messages. It's why I trust J.S.Epperson, he doesn't add that stuff in.
I like the Ozric stuff, it's interesting. I'll have to give it a try when I am not at work.
_________________ When your arguments are guided by your conclusions, you aren't doing philosophy, you are merely demonstrating your bias.
but this Ozric Tentacles sounds like background music 17:53 it goes reggae...Also I have never met a person who was into chillout music and wasn't using some substance.
Yes that's about all the band is.. instrumental jams that fit nicely in the background. Over other bands of the same genre I like Ozric Tentacles because underneath the mix of sampling there is a real drummer playing.. and he holds that shit down. The bassist and guitarist are good too, so you have a nice mix of electronic sampling keyboard techniques and instrument produced music. This is an example of the limits you reach before you leave the organic production of music and enter the synthetic. When it is not created manually through an instrument but rather a program, it has lost something vital.
Jarno
Gender : Posts : 2282 Join date : 2015-08-27 Age : 32 Location : Finland
I first time read the lyrics of riders of doom, I like them, I always love the heroic, the last resort lyrics.
Swords, we seek swords, savage ones. We, iron kings, servants of Doom. Farewell, heaven; farewell, earth; farewell snow; we die Farewell; as servants of Doom, we die!
We seek savage swords, We, iron kings, servants of fate, bringing deadly weapons, sprung from the earth against the enemy in war. We control high-spirited horses, shaking their proud heads Spirits of the dead, give death and bitter grief to the enemy who must laid low. Hail Nevis, hail iron Hail weapons, hail gore, Hail the fight, hail those who are about to die! Skylon!
Enses, enses requirimus, requirimus saevos nos. Nos ferrei reges, servi Fati. Vale caelum, vale terra, vale nivis, morimur! Vale, morimur servis Fati! Capita superba quatientes Mortem hostibus et luctem date Acrem di manes sternadis. Ave ferrum, Ave tela Ave Nevis, moritur! Ave ferrum, Ave tela Ave Nevis, moritur! Ave pugna! Enses, servi Fati, requirimus saevos nos. Enses, servi Fati, requirimus saevos nos. Morta ex terra mortiferra tela Morta ex terra mortiferra tela Enses, servi Fati, requirimus saevos nos. Enses, servi Fati, requirimus saevos nos. Morta ex terra mortiferra tela In hostes bello ad moventes. Nos ferrei reges, servi Fati. Vale caelum, vale terra, vale nivis, morimur! Skylon!
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37241 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
but this is a topic for another thread. I don't honestly think this music (electric guitar) no matter how complex it tries to be is worth anything in the end...
