I grew up playing technical death metal with progressive elements. Doing so took a LOT of work. Hours every single day just to keep up and wrap my hands and mind around what I had to do. Odd time signatures, sweeping, key changes, tempo changes, often while singing, too. Not everything that I wrote or played was a masterpiece, but most of it was good.
I’ve been playing for over twenty five years now. Though I still listen to a good bit of technical music, what I got into in the last five years or so was darker folk music that has a similar vibe to a lot of darker metal in tone and subject material, but that’s almost entirely acoustic. I’ve found that a lot of the people that make this music are serious metalheads themselves, which tells me that I’ve found a good place.
Writing this music has been a real challenge. First of all, as a singer/guitarist/songwriter this means that now people can actually understand my lyrics, and authenticity is huge in this genre. Second of all, the guitar parts are not the focus; if I wanted to write a killer guitar part before, if I struggled to understand where to go or how to fit it in there, there were a few things that I could almost always do. When it’s just me and an acoustic guitar, I have to be vulnerable, and writing one song takes longer for me now and is overall tougher than writing five technical death metal songs ever was for me. I have to actually put myself out there, and even if the guitar part is simpler now, I have to write it and play it without any irony or apathy.
I’m not saying that simpler music is better, or that technical guitarists “have no feel, man.” I’m saying that for me, what I’m doing now is immensely more difficult, and it’s made me a far better guitarist than I ever thought I could be.
I’m curious if anyone else has had similar experiences.
