No music theory will make you play this solo

[Carl-Richard]

The thing about this solo is not that it's impossible to play, but that it contains some incredibly musical but not music-theoretically standard series of notes. It's what happens when you play music but you don't know or care much about music theory and you simply play what sounds good.

And sometimes that let's you play things that sound really really good and interesting but that no person who has learned music theory will ever be privied to play (because they have boxed themselves in and limited their range of accepted notes).

And that also goes into my point that music is not something you fundamentally learn in theory, you learn it in practice, you learn it by expressing what your soul hears and feels (I'll refrain from tying this to a discussion of PUA, but I also think this also applies in a big way to communication between other human beings, a.k.a. "being social"; it's something you "do" most fundamentally, and getting boxed in by theory, "getting stuck in your mind", can definitely limit you).

4:00-4:32

This one is also sooo coool:

1:42-2:07

(The solo at 3:05-3:35 is also pretty cool).

Edited Sunday at 05:16 AM by Carl-Richard

[Joseph Maynor]

Trey Azagthoth is an amazing guitar player and has his own style.

[Carl-Richard]

34 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Trey Azagthoth is an amazing guitar player and has his own style.

The riffs also in Morbid Angel are so good and catchy. My favorites are in Angel Of Disease (I'm thinking of that one during the first solo), Caesar's Palace, God of Emptiness. No wonder they inspired so many metal legends (Gojira's entire early discography is essentially "Nothing Is Not"; Opeth's riffs in "Master's Apprentices" come to mind; the intro riff in Bloodbath's "Breeding Death" is so similar to the intro riff in "Immortal Rites", and likewise the intro riff in "Mock The Cross" is so similar to "Where the Slime Live").

Edited Sunday at 05:46 AM by Carl-Richard

[Joseph Maynor]

18 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

The riffs also in Morbid Angel are so good and catchy. My favorites are in Angel Of Disease (I'm thinking of that one during the first solo), Caesar's Palace, God of Emptiness. No wonder they inspired so many metal legends (Gojira's entire early discography is essentially "Nothing Is Not"; Opeth's riffs in "Master's Apprentices" come to mind; the intro riff in Bloodbath's "Breeding Death" is so similar to the intro riff in "Immortal Rites", and likewise the intro riff in "Mock The Cross" is so similar to "Where the Slime Live").

I would love to hear instrumentals (without vocals) of their first 3 albums.  He is a genius guitar player.  

[Carl-Richard]

And this one you will also never play based on music theory, but you need amazing musicality, creativity, fearlessness, flow AND music theory. It is the greatest solo in the history of metal:

3:09

 

It's said that when Marty Friedman played this solo in the studio, Dave Mustaine stood up and shook his hand.

[Rigel]

Sure, that’s not how they derived the solos but theory isn’t meant to tell you how to play in the first place. That’s a misunderstanding.
Every thing in there can be described in theoretical terms. There’s ways to describe way more unconventional music than this.

All good music was derived independent of theory, even if the artist knows theory. You can paint by number very complex, weird shit. Meanwhile « Let it be » by the Beatles is four basic chords and simple melody but it’s a banger cause it comes from the ear even if it’s dead easy.

Listen to George Harrison’s solo on « something » also dead simple and theoretically typical. That shit slaps.

My experience with talking to and hearing hundreds of pros along with my own practice in the last decade as shown me that the people that poo poo theory generally play worst. Of course theory is not replacing the ear, that’s absurd. But I have encountered this poo pooing of theory many times and usually comes from limited players. The trap is there, you could choose to paint by numbers but that’s not how actual working musicians generally use theory.

[Carl-Richard]

7 hours ago, Rigel said:

Sure, that’s not how they derived the solos but theory isn’t meant to tell you how to play in the first place. That’s a misunderstanding.

It's not meant to, but it inevitably does, by the simple fact that people like harmony (consonance) and playing inside scales or chords more than outside and they will tend to do so when they have the wherewithal to do so. People who don't know as much about such things will hover in and around until they find something that works or sounds good, which sometimes could lead to a relatively simplistic or formulaic playing style or it could lead to a very interesting and open (and dissonant) one (or a mix of both).

And of course there is the phenomena of simply learning a scale and "letting the scale tell you what to play" rather than having it as a template for which notes could sound good (roughly paraphrasing Guthrie Govan); your insight is in a sense a response to that common tendency in especially new players, that it doesn't have it be that way (but yet indeed, it's a common thing that happens). And some genres and players are more prone to such "scale tyranny" than others, e.g. technical death metal neoclassical arpeggio virtuosos (Necrophagist, Obscura, etc.).

What is exactly so cool about the two first solos I linked is that they are quite dissonant at times, and that if you are a scale fanatic, you will again be more likely to sit within harmony and use dissonance at most very strategically or sparingly.

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard

[Joseph Maynor]

10 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

And this one you will also never play based on music theory, but you need amazing musicality, creativity, fearlessness, flow AND music theory. It is the greatest solo in the history of metal:

3:09

 

It's said that when Marty Friedman played this solo in the studio, Dave Mustaine stood up and shook his hand.

Yes.  You can hear him playing through the changes very nicely in that solo too.  

[Joseph Maynor]

One of my favorite guitar solos.  
 

I like Dave Mustaine's solo in 5 Magics.  He has an interesting solo style.  Kind of a non-linear style.
 

 

Edited 18 minutes ago by Joseph Maynor