Friday, March 11, 2011

The Eras of Metal Guitar


Music has seen a very detailed progression since the birth of metal and hard-rock in the late 1960s. It would be impossible to fit it all into an article, but I'm going to go over the basic progression of how metal guitar found its way into the current state that we know it. It started out with Hendrix and Steppenwolf, also Black Sabbath and began to work its way up to the sounds of bands like Zeppelin and AC/DC, then pushed out gradually into how we know it now. In this article I'm going to talk analytically about the differences in sounds that occurred throughout these times.

The 60s contained the birth of distorted guitar with Hendrix, that quickly began to catch on with other musicians like Clapton and so you begin to see more experimentation that continued to progress to what we have today. Without those originals we would not have had bands like Megadeth, Metallica and Avenged Sevenfold.

The 70s were an important time for the generation of metal guitar, because this is when bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest first began to rear their heads and play a sound that was heavier and darker sounding than their previous counterparts. Their songs and playing were faster, a bit more complex, and just more sinister.

Over the following decades we began to see bands emerge from the underground local scenes such as Metallica from the thrash metal scene, also in the early 1980s there were the first Black Metal groups like Mayhem. The 80s were when technical skills became the main emphasis, because this was following the rise of a band called Van Halen who popularized two-handed tapping. Guitarists were focusing more on techniques like tapping and arpeggios, sweeps and even classical implementation.

This set the stage going into the 1990s for a new sound and a new generation of metal guitar, technical skills were still relevant but grunge had also emerged and in those circles it was less emphasized. For the thrash metal scene guitar players like Marty Friedman and Dave Mustaine became well-known in Megadeth and instrumental players such as Steve Vai and Joe Satriani also started to set the bar very high. Keep in mind though that Friedman and Steve Vai were very active players before the 90s but had a considerable surge of popularity during this decade.

Moving into the 2000s a style called "nu-metal" became popular that mixed rap and rock together. Bands that flourished in this time were Korn, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot. They enjoyed much popularity for a few years but going into our current day they are looked at differently and are not nearly as popular. This goes for the whole nu-metal genre.

In present some hard-rock/metal bands that are considered representative of our time are Avenged Sevenfold, Dragonforce, Arch Enemy and many more. These bands exhibit strong technical ability with a talent for songwriting, the result you get is a darkly diverse sound with incredible technical display.








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