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I'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 extreme
by issa 4y ago
I'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.
- issa 4y agooh man. I appreciate the sentiment, but the only music these days is jamming with my daughters around the house.
- scott_s 4y agoWoooow. I saw you play at a tiny show that took place in a dorm common area in DC. One of the other bands was Midvale.
- issa 4y agooh yeah. I think that was an AR conference at American University? Fun!
- tarentel 4y agoTo your last point, at least some of the songs he used as examples do not have a chord progression. Probably none of them really do. In traditional western music theory, a chord has to have at least 3 distinct notes. A power chord isn't really a chord in a classical music theory sense so any song that is made up of just power chords and someone singing, or just screaming, roots or fifths over those wouldn't really be considered to have a chord progression. In some of the songs it sounds like they're only playing one note at a time. In the video he says there are a lot of I-IV-V intervals in this genre of music. In a harmonic sense though they don't fit into any sort of chord progression. It's not a major I-IV-V, it's not a i-iv-V or a i-iv-v. It's just 3-4 notes played individually so they don't really function as a traditional definition of a chord progression which establishes or goes against a key. It's ambiguous.
- brudgers 4y agoSonically, a power chord has power because human hearing hears the two notes as second and third harmonics and the brain inserts a first harmonic below them into our experience. We experience an E1 when A2 is played over E2. What we don’t hear is a third (9th or 10th harmonic) and the third forms the basis of the harmonic theories from the Period of Common Practice, and because the video is academic, those theories are the context in which chord progressions are discussed in the video.
- issa 4y agoAlso a common misconception that hardcore punk bands only play power chords. A lot of bands are playing barre chords and hitting all the strings (imagine!). I learned most of the songs in the examples that way--whether the original guitarists did or did not, I don't know. Full disclosure, I am a self-taught, punk musician with minimal knowledge of music theory. But most hardcore punk songs are just pop songs sped up, so I don't see how one can have a chord progression and the other can't.
- tarentel 4y agoAs brudgers pointed out it's just how a chord progression is defined. A G major chord for example is G/B/D, if you don't have the B it's no longer considered a chord in music theory and if you don't have a chord you can't have a chord progression really. I don't really listen to this type of music but based on the quick snippets that were played only blitzkrieg bop had a chord progression. The other songs were power chords or what sounded like just single notes being played. If other songs in this genre you've heard are playing full bar chords than those would likely be considered to have a chord progression. Also, since most of this discussion, including the video, was around guitar, you can have a chord progressions with one person playing only power chords but someone else has to fill in the gap, like the bass or singer. It's over the whole arrangement not an individual part.