Ultimate musical improvisation/creativity

[zurew]

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

On Death, Part One, by Max Klinger.

Cool ,ty.

[Carl-Richard]

Tech-death / progressive metal anthem.

[Carl-Richard]

The new Opeth album is finally out and it's amazing:

 

What Opeth is known for is their insane dynamic range (jumping between soft prog rock and death metal in the same song), but with this new album, it is taken to new extremes, which I will explain:

Their last four albums saw the elimination of death metal elements (particularly the death metal growls) and rather a revertion back to hard rock or heavy metal elements, while still keeping the dialectic with the soft elements.

So until now, they have essentially had two main "modes" in their dynamic range which they play on. Now, as they have spent the last 13 years building that more classic hard rock heavy metal style, they have created a new mode, which when they reintroduced death metal elements on this album, creates three main modes.

There are some songs where you can distinctly feel this, where instead of a sudden contrast between a soft rock section and a death metal section, you get a slow ramping up from soft, to hard, to death metal. And the death metal parts are really death metal (the song Paragraph 4 contains arguably some of the heaviest death metal parts I've heard). Now, there are some songs from older albums that seem to do this, but I think it has become a more mainstage quality of their songs with this new album.

Edited November 24, 2024 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

I remember back when Opeth released their 2019 album (and also Tool), I was in my heavy meditation and seeking phase and I was listening to these pretty great works of music and not feeling moved or impressed by them at all. I think it was because I was trying to squeeze God out of the music, in a way that was not warranted (on the level of musical ideas, structure, virtuosity).

Even the most virtuosic guitar players like Guthrie Govan didn't fundamentally impress me at that point. It was as if my awareness and ability to focus on the music was simultaneously too intense to be impressed by it, but also that I was so dissociated from my emotional life at that point that every engagement with music was essentially a hollow interpretation of structure (the content, the warmth of each note, the feeling, of being touched, was not there).

But at the same time, this was when I had some of my most amazing musical experiences listening to other music. Maybe it was my expectation to be impressed that ruined it. It was the same for Opeth's 2017 album, and that was released before I had started meditating (in fact, I was in the middle of my unstable phase before starting meditating). But maybe in a weird sense, I was craving God there too, "perfection". Maybe that craving was what pushed me into meditating in the first place. And also, maybe (obviously) truly enjoying God comes when you no longer crave it  In any case, again, Opeth's new album is a banger.

Edited November 27, 2024 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

I've played around with the concept of syntactically vs semantically focused guitar players. The former is for example Allan Holdsworth. The latter is David Gilmour.

Syntax is of course the structure of the music, the sentences, the paragraphs. What sort of musical ideas are being conveyed? How are they combined and conveyed together as a larger whole? How complex are the musical ideas? How long do they stretch over time, how many different notes do they incorporate, all while maintaining the sense of being meaningfully connected to each other?

Semantics is of course the quality of each "unit" of the music; each note, each discernable sound; which may be delivered in many different ways (e.g. bends, vibrato, pauses, strength and subtlety of attack, mutes, pinch harmonics, tremolo picking, pick scratches, etc.).

As for musical syntax, I think I've come across the most intense example of this in Allan Holdsworth's "Mr Berwell" from 03:10 to 03:20. There are what I interpret to be three "phrases" in total (also, you have to be ready, because the first phrase starts immediately):

 

You distinctly notice that he is building on a theme with each phrase, taking one pattern as a starting point and then making slight modifications for each new phrase, and then finally ending with this amazing climax with the longest, fastest and most complex phrase, all while still maintaining the meaningful connection to the preceding phrases. It keeps blowing my mind everytime I hear it. It also really tests your attention span.

Just immense syntax, also completely improvised. If you could measure someone's "musical IQ", Allan Holdsworth would be the Nikola Tesla of that.

Edited December 9, 2024 by Carl-Richard