Prog Metal Essay

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What is prog metal? Prog metal, or better recognized as Progressive Metal is a sub genre of metal music. Progressive metal is a rather underground sub genre but is slowly flowing into the main stream. This is not the average genre of music and neither is the community. What sets it apart from other genres are things like odd time signatures, extended range guitars, overlapping genres, odd playing styles, and also having non-traditional instruments in songs. All of these elements combined all culminate into making some of the most soulful, creative, artistic, music there is to experience. Now lets really see how different it is from the normal heavy metal scene. Prog metal can be traced back to the ’60s-’70s British rock scene. Although certain Surprising or unsurprisingly (depending if your starting to pick up on this genres quirks) , prog has no generic, stereotypical, intro or basic riffs that normal heavy metal uses. It could start relatively fast or a nice beat or a slow piano or guitar solo. There are no rules to making music in prog metal, at all. People such as David Maxim Micic fuses, a classical music style, with jazz, djent, heavy metal, and folk music and instruments. Amazing how so many genres can be mixed into one piece of music. This is done by layering tracks when making music. Though this is by no means a formula for righting prog music an example without getting to much into music theory would be having light, airy, jazzy, exotic clean chords, and chord structures. These are normally panned into the background making it sound distant with added echo and reverb. Next there would be a very djenty, rhythmic guitar and bass patterns riff/ pattern going on usually panned to your left and right soundscape. Sometimes both on each side or one side dedicated to bass and the other to guitar, you can do either. Than with the drums it gets tricky because the drums hold a beat, but they also keep a rhythm most of the time the same rhythm as to each individual strum of the guitar and or bass. So its a very complicated process to play drums in a prog metal band. Add a odd time signature and alternating tempos with a bit of creativity and you got yourself a prog metal

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