Recent content by weepingminotaur

Dave Mustaine has essentially been doing the same canned solo with variations for decades now. They're fun to listen to, but if you've heard one Mustaine solo, you've likely heard them all. (I say this as a big Megadeth fan so no hate.)

It's so dependent on the band, the player, the studio, the producer, the song. Also, artists are not always reliable sources of information about their own creative process (i.e. when two band members have different accounts of how a song was created).

I love listening to someone who changes things up at runtime, but I also love seeing someone turn in a killer "recital" type performance. This is why I like both jazz and metal.

Spot on, but especially the part in bold, which is a part of how I teach first-year students how to read literature. Thinking and feeling are not mutually incompatible activities.

I've definitely played in situations where I didn't have it all the way down on gameday, but they were jams where I had at most one or two brief rehearsals with the people I was playing with. Just how it goes sometimes.

Very interesting. I have one guitar with a Naz and another with a Black Winter, and I can imagine that they'd be a killer combo for studio work. Both very heavy, but also very much possessing their own individual character.

I think there is a certain amount of talking past each other that happens when theory comes up, in that non-theory players sometimes think knowing theory means thinking more about what you're playing at runtime, which is not actually the case frequently (maybe not at all). In its best form...

Different from the Custom? The Custom isn't mid-forward and has more bass, for one thing.

Not disagreeing with the above points, but here's what my ears hear: both the Nazgul and the Winter are mid-forward, and they both hold up very well under high gain. Lots of clarity and note definition. The Nazgul gives you more of a classic metal crunch, with a bit of an upper-mid spike...

I'll have you know that's not unique! :D

Rex, you are the first person I've ever heard use the word "polite" to describe the Nazgul! :)

TBH I am still trying to figure out how they got away with that name without getting sued by the Tolkien estate!

I also think that both camps (theory and no theory) idealize the extent to which their playing is "free" of whatever it is they're trying to get away from. :)

IMO metaphors are not particularly helpful in this discussion, in that you can bring too many variables from whatever metaphoric scenario you're sketching out to either disprove the other person or prove your point, since it's all just general metaphor and not localized in any specific and...

For sure. The BW is a funny case because they went so hard on the ov fire and void vibe outside of the specs -- the name, the lettering on the pickup case, the description. But then the happy accident occurred: guitarists started to use it and quickly figured out that it had many more versatile...