Zyquix wrote:
Well, what do you say are the differences between progressive metal and technical metal? I prety much use them interchangably
Well
STOP DOING THAT!!!! Just kidding.
Let's take a few examples. Dream Theater. By now pretty much everyone agrees that they are a progressive metal band. So as not to confuse the issue, let's take their CD Images and Words. Now play that CD, and just listen to what the music does. Sure it has some parts that are at a pretty high level of intricacy, but almost always
only during instrumental breaks and solos. Whenever James is singing it's mostly power chords or simple riffs.
Much harder for people to grasp are bands like Power Of Omens and Zero Hour and Linear Sphere. I see people calling them tech metal all the time, when in fact, the music tells you it's textbook prog.
Now take Spiral Architect and listen to what their music does. (Cloud Constructor and Moving Spirit don't count as they are really not technical metal songs and have more in common with the DT style prog). You should notice immediately that the unified flow is gone. The runs don't follow predictable patterns, triplets emerge from nowhere, runs stutter and start and stop in weird places, and even when power chords are played, they are shifted around to land on different beats and are not repeated to infinity. Songs are not usually based around chords as much as crazy runs. The drums don't just play back beats, in fact almost never. Even over the simplest music the drums are doing something completely different.
Just listen to what the guitars are playing on the song Spinning. They never settle into anything for any length of time. The patterns are constantly shifting and changing. Then listen to the drums; same thing, always in motion, and the bass is usually playing something different as well, and usually even more busy than the guitars. THAT'S technical metal.
some say prog metal must have odd time sigs, and tech metal is prog metal plus high physical-playing skill. But if that's the case, hypothetically, if Cynic or Spastic Ink etc only used 4/4 time sigs, but kept the complexity of the songs at a high point, would these bands' music cease to be either technical or progressive?
Even more confusing is the fact that prog bands have some songs that are metal without the prog, and technical metal bands have some songs that are more prog than tech on their CDs. Very confusing I admit.
Odd meters are inevitably going to be present in both prog and tech, although technically speaking, they aren't required. A band could play in 4/4, but through the use of syncopation not sound like it at all. The end result would still be unsettling and hard to tap your foot steadily to, so the difference to most is irrelevent I suppose.
If you've heard Spastic Ink, you know that, although they sound nothing like Spiral Architect, their music is on a different level rhythmically and structurally than Dream Theater of Zero Hour, or Fates Warning. Spastic Ink has some SICK syncopation. (They actually have a song that's in 4/4 for the entire song, and the drummer only uses his snare and bass drum for the beats, but that song is totally 'teched' out. Even a song like that is more rhythmically complex than a lot of odd metered measures of most prog bands.) Usually people hear their music as speeding up and slowing down, stopping and starting, drums locking up perfectly with the guitar runs, and an overall unsteady flow upon first listen. Again, THAT'S technical metal. Progressive metal just doesn't maintain that kind of insanity for any length of time. Technical metal is more crazy more of the time.
Call me dogmatic if you want, but I watched for years the prog metal world turn to keyboard metal, and saw the loss of a lot of great bands to an influx of melodic metal and power metal bands. The same thing WILL happen to the technical metal world if we adopt the same philosophy. We shouldn't try to expand the genre by becoming liberal with our definition, we should expand it by forcing bands to meet the criteria. The end result will be much better.
My hats off to you Zyquix for trying to understand and grasp all of this. Did any of this help?
Tom C
