Question for the musicians(new techniques and sounds)

[adaher]

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?

 

[Palabra de Dios]

In modern recorded music, many many producers and bands are using computer programs like ProTools to "perfect" th sound. This includes pitch correction and piecing together different bits to get the perfect version of each song.

 

[adaher]

Yeah, I'd heard a lot about that, as well as Autotune, but I was thinking more about the technical stuff on the playing side, like blast beats or sweep picking.

BTW, is it just me, or are more power metal bass players using picks these days instead of their fingers?

 

[jem777az]

As far as guitar playing, I don't really think there's a whole lot of new techniques perse. Guitarists seem to be taking what was already there and making it more extreme. Faster, heavier, etc. There is a trend with a lot of the more extreme metal bands playing 7 and now 8 string guitars and even downtuning from there. Everyone seems to be trying to tune as low as they can. For whatever reason a lot of bands think lower tuning=heavier song, but this is obviously not the case.

Drumming has gone the route of interdependence. Meaning being able to play anything with any of your four limbs with equal ability. I read an interview with the new DT drummer Mike Mangini where he said one of the new DT songs has a part where he plays one time signature with one side of his body while playing a completely different time signature with his other side. That's what interdependence is all about.