I'm not a musician myself, just an amateur if anything, but the subject fascinates me so I have a question:
You know how in the 80s, a lot of new guitar techniques came into vogue, like fretboard tapping, staccato riffing, arpeggios? Of course those techniques had been around awhile, but they didn't become widely adopted until the 80s. Another example, for keyboards, is Yngwie and Europe having keyboard solos as well as guitar solos. Dream Theater I believe was the first prominent band to actually have the keyboard and guitar solos at the same time. On drums, most bands used a single bass drum, and even the ones with two rarely used a double bass attack like is common with power metal bands now. So a lot of new stuff, or at least stuff the masses hadn't heard before, came to the fore during that period.
So is there anything new in the musician's toolkit in modern metal? I know it sounds a lot different from the way it sounded in the 80s, but is that just production techniques or using existing playing techniques in a different way, or are there genuinely new things guitarist, keyboardists, and drummers are doing that they didn't do much before?
You know how in the 80s, a lot of new guitar techniques came into vogue, like fretboard tapping, staccato riffing, arpeggios? Of course those techniques had been around awhile, but they didn't become widely adopted until the 80s. Another example, for keyboards, is Yngwie and Europe having keyboard solos as well as guitar solos. Dream Theater I believe was the first prominent band to actually have the keyboard and guitar solos at the same time. On drums, most bands used a single bass drum, and even the ones with two rarely used a double bass attack like is common with power metal bands now. So a lot of new stuff, or at least stuff the masses hadn't heard before, came to the fore during that period.
So is there anything new in the musician's toolkit in modern metal? I know it sounds a lot different from the way it sounded in the 80s, but is that just production techniques or using existing playing techniques in a different way, or are there genuinely new things guitarist, keyboardists, and drummers are doing that they didn't do much before?