How Heavy Metal and Punk Inform My Folk Music
One of my earliest musician memories is dancing around my parents’ basement, holding a matchbox race track as my guitar, while Billy Joel’s Glass Houses album rocked the speakers. My favorite song on that album was and still is “Close to the Borderline”, which is one of the heaviest songs in his catalog. When I was 8 years old, I purchased Quiet Riot’s Metal Health on cassette. I would sit and listen to the title song entranced by the sound. By 6th grade, I was listening to all the 80’s hair bands like Motley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Cinderella and Stryper. In 7th grade I was moving on to Iron Maiden and Helloween. By 8th grade I was listening to Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer. I saw Metallica in concert on the ….And Justice for All tour during that same year. My parents were pretty cool to take my friend and I to that show.
I formed my first band that year and wrote enough songs to make an album. We recorded it in the drummer’s breezeway with his father’s reel-to-reel four track machine and my father’s mics. We were pretty young and horrible but that album still gets spins when I want to remind myself where I was during my first 9 months of playing! I can hear all the things I was trying to do to emulate those bands.
During High School, my listening tastes broadened to include punk and hardcore bands like The Misfits, D.R.I., The Crumbsuckers, and The Dead Milkmen and some darker strands of metal like King Diamond and Suicidal Tendencies. My early guitar playing was shaped by this music. I wanted to play these sounds and so I wrote using those sounds.
Building Blocks
The basic building blocks of metal and punk music are power chords and palm muting. This music is designed to be played aggressively on an electric guitar. But sometimes these bands played very beautiful classically inspired guitar parts. (Warning, this link starts out really beautiful then turns very creepy)
Because I wanted those sounds as well, my parents purchased a used nylon string classical guitar for me. I discovered early on that if I hit the strings hard enough while playing power chords that the classical guitar would buzz in a very satisfying way. I started writing songs exclusively on the classical guitar and then moving them to the electric guitar for playing with my band.
FAST FORWARD 14 Years
When I was shopping for my current classical guitar, I played Barrios’s “La Catedral” to hear how sweet it could sound and then aggressively played power chords and palm muting figures to hear if the guitar could buzz like an electric guitar going through a distortion pedal. I needed both extremes without effects and I turned down a lot of guitars because they did not do both.
I recognize how unusual this story is and you might even be wondering why I bought a nylon string guitar instead of a steel string acoustic guitar. I have played a bunch of steel string acoustics in my life and I have never been satisfied with the extremes. I can’t make it sound sweet enough and they never buzz with same fullness when played aggressively.
On to Folk Music
In heavy metal and punk music there are, along with power chords, a whole bunch of other abbreviated chords. I’ll share with you one of my favorite moves I use all the time (most recently in my song Bread + Roses).
The chord progression is |C-| F-7| D˚7| G7|. As a way to build tension in the last verse of the song, both dynamically, and harmonically, I start the chord progression palm muted in a
C power Chord on the 3rd fret of the A String. (C and G).
When I change to F-7, I only play the notes C and Ab. It is just a slight expansion of the power chord shape.
When I change to D˚7, I only play the notes D and Ab. It is a contraction of the power chord shape.
When I change to G7, I only play the notes B and G. It is a slight expansion of the power chord shape.
From the implied G7 chord above, it is just a slight contraction to get back to the C power chord shape or a full C-.
With each repeat I can add extra notes to the chords to build the the fullness of the sound and I can reduce the amount of palm muting to let more sound out.
The video below is a longer explanation of the whole technique and a play through of the section of the song.
I believe all of the music we consume will have an effect on how we write and play our own songs. Any technique that you can use to achieve the sound you are looking for should be on the table for you to experiment with. I hope you find this unorthodox approach to be useful in allowing yourself to explore the sonic possibilities of the guitar.
Thanks for reading,
I’ll see you on the path,
Josh