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How to write a hardcore punk riff [video]
- notahacker 4y agoI like 12tone, but I still think a punk fanzine from '77 nailed the spirit better with "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band"
- vanderZwan 4y agoThat feels a bit unfair to 12tone, given that he starts off with addressing the question of "is applying music theory to punk not completely missing the point of a genre about fighting back against an unfair establishment?" and ends with coming back to that question with: "punk is about rage [against an unfair system] and a refusal to accept that fighting back is meaningless, everything else is window dressing". He's not trying to "nail the spirit" and fully aware that his analysis is just window dressing at the end of the day
- notahacker 4y agoIt wasn't a criticism of the video. On the contrary, he largely gets it when he starts talking about how playing a guitar really quickly using power chords for timbre limits note sequences and eschews tonality, which is why there end up being a lot of call and response and variation-on-previous sequence type rhythmic patterns to analyse But there's more thought involved in labelling the riffs in the video than composing them :D
- brudgers 4y agoThose fifteen year kids old whose lives Never Mind the Bollocks changed are sixty years old, now. Arguing over the "spirit" of punk in 2022 is a full decade more absurd than arguing over the spirit of the Andrews Sisters would have been in 1977. Or to put it another way, the only way to be into punk these days is to entirely miss its point. YMMV.
- notahacker 4y ago> Arguing over the "spirit" of punk in 2022 is a full decade more absurd than arguing over the spirit of the Andrews Sisters would have been in 1977. Or the "spirit" of jazz in 1977 or the blues at more or less any point in the 20th century. I'm not sure the relative absurdity of arguing that musical genres have "spirit" or an ethos, or any sort of basic continuity is measured in years since first release... And I don't think kids picking up guitars and tuning them to drop D to play one finger chords really fast are that much more influenced by '77 nostalgia or the barre chords in the little-remembered fanzine than music theory videos. But the basic approach changes a lot less than the ad hoc theory applied to it, or indeed the music.
- brudgers 4y agoToday, electric guitar power chords signify conformity to grandpa’s musical traditions not youthful rebellion. Barbershop quartet would be more daring.
- agentwiggles 4y agomy mileage varies on this for sure. i take your point but idk. there's definitely a spectrum ranging from Greta Van Fleet to something like Black Midi (or insert other weird band I haven't heard of that makes the point)
- brudgers 4y agoBlack MIDI is post-punk since MIDI came in the 1980’s and Black MIDI only became possible years later when computers became much more powerful. And of course, Black MIDI has a formalism consistent with academic music and modernist composition of the 20th century. Which is to say, Black MIDI is avant-garde and insiders sitting at computer looking at notes on a screen. There’s no outrage and nothing outrageous.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
- rwmj 4y agoI think this is a good example of why Youtube's content ID match is a plague. This video would have been far better with more and longer musical examples.
- silviot 4y agoI absolutely LOVE 12tone! I'm not a musician, but I enjoy learning music theory concepts, and that channel for me is pure gold. I can understand half of what's said there, and still enjoy it a lot. A couple of my favourite videos are: * Why Does Metal Have To Be So Loud? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEdIKG7pm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEdIKG7pm8 * What We Get Wrong About Genres https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXOowACoUjE&t=478s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXOowACoUjE&t=478s
- raydiatian 4y agoAs somebody learning music theory actively, I respect the content he puts out but I don’t really respect his presentational format. His doodles are distracting and often only tangentially related to whatever he’s talking about.
- silviot 4y agoInteresting. For me they help follow what he's saying: after a few minutes I can peek at the doodles and I remember what points he touched. I never thought some people might dislike that part, but now I see you and a sibling comment do. I wonder if it's good for people like me (who don't know much about music theory) and bad for people in the field. If this is the case I believe it's a good choice: the audience of non experts is much bigger and thus the majority of viewers finding this helpful will outweight the problems of those who dislike it.
- lomaprietasolo 4y agoI completely agree. So I just turn off the video and treat these presentations as podcasts. I find the audio content is informative and doesn't need the visual distraction at all.
- raydiatian 4y agoPodcasted
- pestatije 4y ago
- pringk02 4y agoThis was quite interesting. I used to play in a lot of bands like these and wrote many songs and it's funny because although I have kind of basic musical theory knowledge, I often felt like I couldn't really map the riffs I wrote and liked back onto the theory frameworks beyond maybe sometimes some idea of modality.
- issa 4y agoWhat bands were you in?
- pringk02 4y agoNone that ever done more than a demo now lost to the ether unfortuantely. Hardcore punk scene in Scotland in the 00's wasn't big and a bit incestuous.
- issa 4y agoI was in a band called Good Clean Fun. In 2000 we played in Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Definitely a small scene, but we had a GREAT time.
- luciusdomitius 4y ago[flagged]
- telmo 4y agoHardcore punk is pretty close to left wing anarchism. Is this news to you? Also: it is possible to criticize the capitalist system without advocating communism. Believe it or not, it is not a binary choice.
- vibrio 4y agoThat is a pretty broad brush for hardcore punk. Are there examples advocating communism that are you thinking of specifically?
- coldtea 4y agoYou don't need to "advocate communism" to "critique the capitalist system". Anarchists, bohemians, ecologists, distributists, nihilists, existentialists, hippies, traditionalists, some religious groups (including some christian demominations) and several other political or social movements and philosophies do it - in fact, one could also include social democrats in that. Not to mention that advocating communism is not the same as advocating Stalinism or Eastern Bloc style opression (as is often implied), not anymore than advocating capitalism is advocating for the attrocities made by capitalist countries.
- vibrio 4y agoI don't disagree with your points. Returning to the thread, I was curious about the hardcore punk bands that advocate communism, and whether that was too broad of a brush to cover that genre. The person in the video lists Bad Brains, Minor Threat Black Flag, and The Dead Kennedys as prototypical. Do any of these "advocate communism" to "critique the capitalist system"?
- n4r9 4y ago
- smallerfish 4y agoI really enjoyed his video about Lydian Chromatic Concept a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAt1Vcuy5LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAt1Vcuy5LY. Adam Neely has a short critique in the comments, so hopefully he will release a video talking about it further.
- nxpnsv 4y agoLots of good videos from 12tone, not only educational but satisfyingly hypnotic. I need to ask, is he writing words from end to front?
- issa 4y agoI've written many a hardcore punk song, and I am a pretty poor guitarist. I think my main comment on the video is that playing barre chords very fast is extremely easy. The good guitar players in the punk world add things beyond chords. Also, I've never thought of punk as "not having chord progressions". That just seems...incredibly wrong.
- lawgimenez 4y agoHi are you Issa of Good Clean Fun?
- niix 4y agoThat would be rad! Edit: It is! Look at his email.
- issa 4y agoHa. I am indeed. And this is not the place I usually expect to discuss hardcore!
- lawgimenez 4y agoAwesome! On the streets album is one of my favorite when I was a teenager. I don’t know if you remember but you replied to my email interview back 2009 when GCF went out with a movie or something like that.
- issa 4y agoThat's awesome. Of course I remember that email! haha. Hit me up sometime and we can talk startups, tech and hardcore. You probably know my co-founder's publication... The Hard Times?
- lawgimenez 4y agoOf course every hardcore kid knows that site, no idea he was your cofounder. No idea you are even a tech founder! This is crazy cool. Thanks for entertaining me here, GCF should put out new music in my opinion but that's for another day.
- bugfix-66 4y agoMake it sound like what "Amyl & The Sniffers" are doing: Guided By Angels: https://youtu.be/Z--D1flPLnk https://youtu.be/Z--D1flPLnk Hertz: https://youtu.be/zb5Ja6V4OeY https://youtu.be/zb5Ja6V4OeY Best modern punk band by a mile, lead singer is incredible!
- squarefoot 4y agoI wasn't aware of that channel, thanks for posting. I also found his doodles distracting, although in a very positive way, they're beautiful. Took me a while to notice he's a leftie who can write and draw both ways. I'm a natural leftie writing left to right and for a while attempted to learn to handwrite as a right hand with mediocre results although my right hand is actually the one I use for precision work and can easily use it to write or do basic drawings on a whiteboard. As for drawing, I'm terrible no matter the hand I use.
- ilamont 4y agoFormer 80s punk guitarist here. "It's really easy to make boring punk music" - so true! It was easy to identify the greats at that time, some of whom the narrator cites - Bad Brains, Minor Threat, DKs, etc. We found out about them through word of mouth, live shows, fanzines, listening to records at friends' places, or college radio. But man was it hard to write songs as good as that. And maybe the problem was we were listening to too much punk and hardcore and were determined to reject everything about "classic rock," and the 80s electronic influences that were taking over the pop charts. These seminal hardcore bands not only had fantastically skilled musicians (including vocals), but also they were coming from a much different place than we assumed, something I didn't find out until later. It's a mistake to think of them as amateurs who only knew the Sex Pistols and Ramones before they picked up their instruments. Bad Brains started out as a jazz/pop band. Greg Ginn of Black Flag also had some kind of jazz backgroud. I read somewhere that one of their favorite albums in the tour van in the early 80s was ZZ Top's Eliminator. Flea, who played bass in Fear before cofounding RHCP, was a high-level French Horn player in high school. East Bay Ray - surf and jazz. D Boon of the Minutemen studied flamenco guitar at one point. There's a great book by Michael Azzerad (Our band could be your life, https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/michael-azerrad/our-band-could-be-your-life/9780316247184/ https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/michael-azerrad/our-band-...) which gets into the influences of many 80s/early 90s bands including Minor Threat, who late in their existence were veering off into U2 influenced rock. I know hardcore is fast, but had no idea the BPM was 300-400 for many of these songs. I remember seeing the Circle Jerks once and their new bass player couldn't keep up. His hand was clearly in pain.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scelerat 4y ago> maybe the problem was we were listening to too much punk and hardcore and were determined to reject everything about [not punk] IMO a classic artistic trap, especially for those enamored with a particular genre. Also a musician here, who has seen plenty of copycat scene bands, as well as others who have transcended their niche partially by having rich and diverse sources of inspiration.
- 4y ago
- andruc 4y agoFor the aging ones that remember the good ol' flash days, the Punk-o-Matic is still online: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/147276 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/147276