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:	post by ShadowSD at 2009-11-24 20:39:41

I agree.

Riffing is a means to an end, however; it's a technique, and what it is used to accomplish is what matters.

There are also certain chord progressions that pop up commonly in both metal and its Baroque ancestry, most commonly involving some combination of chords with a i and a VI. This simply is not nearly as common in blues or rock.

But even with notes and chords, a better indicator of musical identity than tone and instrumental arrangement, it nonetheless all comes down to what end is being achieved by those notes, moreso than just the means to do it. For instance, you occasionally CAN have a blues song where the solo might use a M2 or m6 despite the fact that its unconventional, or have a blues song or even a techno song with a i - VI progression, it's certainly not impossible; none of these rules are ironclad in differentiating genre. However, certain tendencies CAN push us in the right direction the vast majority of the time.

In the end, though, it's as much what you hear as what can be put neatly into boxes; that's not to imply it's merely subjective, but rather that there are certain things in music that while existing in an objective fashion are impossible to herd in perfectly with a few rules, and requires the big picture forest for the trees analysis that only a human ear in real time can provide; rules on paper get us circling the right answers, but sometimes we have to make the last bit of the leap ourselves. My favorite example to put all this abstract theoretical gobbledegook in perspective is Sweating Bullets by Megadeth, as blues and metal both use the tritone commonly, but both do so entirely in different ways. Consider the verse of the song, a purposefully composed straight blues riff by any measure (despite metal distortion AND use of power chords), and then the chorus, a riff that also uses the tritone but is undisputably metal (and especially so due an additional overriding i-V-VII-IV chord progression being implied by the chromatic descent from the lead guitar and vocal harmony, offering a complexity you would never see in blues or rock: a chord progression within a chord progression).

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