Metal Heroes Part Deux

Opeth aren't the easiest band for a guitarist of somewhat-less-than-moderate talent to emulate. I love them, and I do my best with what little tab exists, (not that much of it is any good since they seldom use straightforward chords and most tabbers have ears of tin), but when I play much on my own I find myself barre chord riffing and experimenting with slower, simpler melodic lines. No surprise, then, that I love the music of both Swallow the Sun and Daylight Dies. Both of them make some of the most melodic, simple, and massively heavy music out there.

I really don't know what to write about Juha Raivio and Markus Jamsen (of Swallow the Sun) or Barre Gambling and Charlie Shackelford (of Daylight Dies) or Greg Mackintosh and Aaron Aedy (of Paradise Lost) as players, except that they are exceptionally tasteful and understated players more interested in making beautiful music than in showing off their chops. Not that they have no chops, mind you. There are plenty of moments that show their technical abilities. Most often, however, they spend their time in service to the overall compositions and the atmosphere of the songs.

I think part of my love for these bands and their guitar work lies in the stately tone they get from their guitars and the way that their music shows that off. They all use a lovely, saturated, sustaining high-gain sound with a nice, full midrange rather than the scoop and chunk of most modern American metal. There's also some nice air and reverb in the mix without it going all cavernous and echoey like a lot of classic metal or early death metal bands.

Too many times it seems to me that guitar players get recognition mostly from having impressive chops that will sell a lot of equipment and magazines to new players who are impressed by speed. These guys remain under the radar, especially in the US music media, because they are more musicians than guitar celebrity spokesmodels. No one is going to buy a magazine chock full of their riffs because they aren't players who can be distilled into a page full of riffs, solos, and rhythm figures. They are more about chord progressions and melodies. Playing their music, which is not too difficult to pick out on your own, teaches you more about music theory and how to think outside of scales and keys and go for those little moments of transformation within the scope of the song.

I should also mention here that all of the guitar players I have mentioned so far have the good fortune to play with excellent, musical bass players who, in contrast to the norm, often play more complex lines than the guitars they are 'supporting.' Pretty much all of these guys are in ensemble bands where the whole is far greater than the individual star power of the parts.

Next up...a shift into the folkier side of metal.

ETA: I've been thinking about this post a bit and have concluded that Mackintosh and Aedy are much more riffy a unit than the other two bands, but the part of their music that sticks with me most is not the riffs, but rather the more lyrical parts. So I cheated a bit. I can live with that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nut and Bridge Width: the Other Important Dimensions in Guitar Playing

Image
So a lot of people have appreciated my discussions of scale length and pickup placement. Lately, though, I've been thinking about the other dimension that affects playing -- width. There's not a lot of discussion of it where electric guitar players are concerned beyond the big hands = wide nut conversations, but there's more to it than that. I'll get into the details of it in a moment, but first a bit of context. A few months back, I bought a Cordoba Mini R guitar. It's a nylon string classical guitar with a 20" scale length, but close to a full width and string spacing classical nut (2") and bridge. (It's tuned up a fourth to keep the strings from getting floppy.) It's a very good little guitar and so much fun to play, and the extra width at the neck really helps to keep the guitar from feeling as cramped as it might if I were having to deal with the closeness of the frets from the shortened scale. (For comparison, put a capo at the fifth fret
Read more

Scale Length, Physics, and 22 vs. 24 Frets -- Why Ed Roman is Full of Crap

A while back while I was looking for my Hagstrom guitar I ended up on the Ed Roman site and poked around a bit to see what he had to say. His site definitely has a high entertainment value compared to many other high traffic guitar sites on the web because unlike most other sites that simply reproduce the marketing copy of the big name guitar makers and avoid much controversy, Ed Roman (or Ed Roman's ghost writer, if he uses one) aims to attract an audience that is suspicious of these marketing claims. The gist of Ed Roman's arguments can be summed up in two sentences: You're a sucker if you buy a big name guitar from a corporate music store. Smart guitar players buy hand built American guitars from Ed Roman. Ed puts forth this argument wherever he can, weaving it through his ad copy and linking in and out of his webpage to lead surfers from the popular brands on his site to one of the guitars -- an Abstract, Baker, Pearlcaster, or Quicksilver -- for which Ed Roman is the p
Read more

Bass Guitar Scale Length, String Gauge, and Tuning

Back in March I wrote about wanting to shift from guitar to bass. Since then I went ahead and made the jump, picking up a beautiful, used Yamaha bass at a ridiculously low price given the materials and workmanship. (For more on why I chose a used instrument, read my Eco Guitar Ponderings post from back in 2010). The choice of a used instrument was easy compared to the back-and-forth thinking that I did about whether to get a standard 34" scale bass or to opt instead for either a medium scale (32") or short scale (30") bass to give my aching wrists a break. I've written a few times before on this blog about guitar scale length and its relation to pickup placement and fret placement, tuning, and intonation . It's a topic that I'm pretty comfortable with in terms of the underlying physics and how they make the instrument sound and play. I've also gone through a couple of months in the past when I was unable to play much because of shoulder and wrist pa
Read more