Re:Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third
by titzer on Friday May 29, 2020 @07:53AM
(#23348868)
Blues, not metal or rock, is absolutely full of microtonal wails and chirps and wiggles and vibrato, and fret pressure very much gives way to a whole new way to think about the strings; not something to press down like a button at exactly perpendicular force to delicately or firmly contact the frets, but strings are something to be grabbed, ripped, whipped, twisted behind the frets. Add to that a hard attack can whiplash a string out of tune by another 10 cents, and we are talking about making this thing a voice, not some synthesized keyboard doodad. It's a human soul wailing. That's the blues.
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Not rock? I guess we'd have to know your definition of "rock"... but if you allow "classic" or "progressive" rock into your view, then a lot of those players utilize every aspect of expression on the guitar.
And how about the whammy bar? Maybe guitarists aren't consciously using it to untemper their intervals, but to say "rock guitar" is locked to tempered tuning is incorrect.
Re:Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third
by DerDangDerDang on Friday May 29, 2020 @10:04AM
(#23350067)
Not metal?
Go listen to some of Dimebag Darrell’s solos. They sound ridiculously bad if played in whole semitones. Fair enough, he’s fairly bluesy. But other genres of metal give the distinction you give the left hand to the right too - variations in pick attack wildly change the sound.
I’m guessing it’s fair to suggest that similar things exist in all genres of music, and on all instruments.