Where does "Hard Rock" leave off to become "Heavy Metal"...etc.

In particular, the technology behind recording drums. You could argue that the form was informed and even to a degree defined by drum recording technology.

70s hard rock recordings usually have pretty boxy-sounding drums. Or worse, in a genre defined by artful hypertrophy, small sounding drums.

Engineers started figuring out ways to emphasize both the attack of low instruments--bass, toms--while cutting out frequencies that would collide unhelpfully with bass guitar/low end of main mnster guitars,

And so the double bass drum thing could *really* go batshit. And when you could convincingly pull that off, you could pull off a whole mess of subgenres based on rapid repeat propulsion.

As for big: gated reverb, sampling, automated mixing based on instantaneous volume adjustments between featured instruments.

The point is, a Rammstein CD (to me they're, like, Procol Harum metal) wouldn't have been technically possible even 15 years ago.

But are there contemporary artists working a vein that might be termed "hard rock" but not metal? I heard a band like this the other night -- old local dorks who looked & sounded like beered-up bikers. Chugging along with an attitude too greasy for punk and too heavy for boogie. "Fuck me," I thought, "these guys are hard rock!"

almost all emo bands? (discounting only those, like thursday, that actually are probably metal.)

yes! for instance:

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0447/eddy.php

I would say the last fairly sucessful hard rock not metal band (unless they *were* metal, you decide) was Buck Cherry (unless Montgomery Gentry count, which they should). The last HUGELY sucessful one, unless there's one that I'm not thinking of, was possibly Black Crowes. The one the major labels are hyping most nowadays is Silvertide, maybe.

Moronic. 98 percent of the metal albums I listen to were recorded using "valve amplifiers" and the "pedals" used, particularly in the case of Black Sabbath all the way up to Zakk Wylde's latest trademarked merch, actually add warmth in the upper mids of the guitar frequency spectrum.

You won't find many single coil pickups--humbuckers, dude.

Hendrix, Ritchie Blackmore, Iggy Malmsteen and his followers, etc.

You have to work on developing your funk gland. "Fairies Wear Boots" is entirely built on a riff one would come up with from listening to R&B or swinging jazz records. Go back and listen to the first five or six Sabbath records again. The rhythm section flexes quite a bit.

Malmsteen's and Wylde's famous preamp pedals are both OVERDRIVES and not distortion boxes. In spite of the fact that I hate the way the word is thrown around in guitar gear circles, they are definitely designed to add warmth.

Hendrix' sound is light fuzz in front of massive tube power amp distortion. Again... not hard-clipping distortion.

Here's where my original post starts before the xpost:

Heavy metal is darker and the guitars chug with a different sort of distortion.

I know what was meant by this comment, and I'm not arguing with it, but the technology of rock needs a nod here too...

I'll save ILM from one of my long-winded explanations of the difference between "overdrive" and "distortion" (which usually include me drawing waveforms and even circuit diagrams on whatever's available at the time), but there's a big difference.

The short version:

Soft-clipping (overdrive) is for the most part compatible with chords and is what happens when you simply turn up a tube amp all the way. It's descended from blues players (who were the folks who figured out that a Fender amp sounds best when dimed) and it's all over hard rock (and metal for that matter).

Hard-clipping (distortion) creates all kinds of "extra" notes (whether the player actually picks to create false harmonics a la Eddie in the first place). As such most chords (i.e. three or more notes) just sound like dissonant ass... Distortion is much better suited to solos or other single note playing.

Then here comes the power chord which, because it's just a fifth, sounds great with distortion because the false note created by hard-clipping is mathematically right between them. Which is to say it's the missing third in the major chord.

Once the more aggressive sounding clipping started to be used for rhythm tracks it opened the door to a lot of very different sounds just like newer techniques in EQ opened the door to shit like the insane double kick drum attack.

Add to that some developments in amplifier design (especially shit like double rectifiers) and guitars (active electronics and pick-up design), and you can easily chart a timeline showing guitar sound going from a 6V6 Fender-style saturated tube sound up through the "British tube" Marshall and Vox sounds all the way to the insanely thick shit that is Nu-Metal.

Trust me. That really was the short version.

I don't make any assertions about which types of clipping are more indicative of metal vs hard rock, but more recent technique and technology certainly made a lot possible in what most people would call metal, and most of it wasn't adopted much at all in what you'd call hard rock.

As a side note, there's a good argument that rhythmic structure has a lot (if not the most) to do with the difference. Which is to say that metal by definition does not "groove" in the way that rock (especially rock that shows it's blues roots obviously) is allowed to. Metal bands can actually execute what would be considered a dirge or a march with different instrumentation. (Seriously, "Iron Man" is a tremendous example.) I don't think it's possible to do that and be simply "hard rock."

You're right, a simpleton could.

70s hard rock recordings usually have pretty boxy-sounding drums. Or worse, in a genre defined by artful hypertrophy, small sounding drums.

And what would those be? All Black Sabbath records? Deep Purple? UFO? Van Halen? The Ramones? The Who's "Live at Leeds?" Ted Nugent? Montrose? [Add a couple hundred more here.]

Engineers started figuring out ways to emphasize both the attack of low instruments--bass, toms--while cutting out frequencies that would collide unhelpfully with bass guitar/low end of main mnster guitars,

And Abe Kesh didn't do this on Blue Cheer and Harvey Mandel records in the 60's? Or Neal Slaven with British white boy bloozmen? Or Eddie Kramer's work on all the Hendrix and Cactus albums? Or Bob Ezrin? Or, or, or [add a couple hundred more different examples here]?

And so the double bass drum thing could *really* go batshit. And when you could convincingly pull that off, you could pull off a whole mess of subgenres based on rapid repeat propulsion.

Irrelevant.

Definitely a contributor to the modern style, but the story is complex. I'm going to lay it at the feet of Mesa-Boogie who started making small-sized amplifiers with incredible power and a stacked pre-amp stage for people like Country Joe and the Fish.

Boogie started out making amps that sustained forever due to the gain structure at the -front- of the amp, it's pre-amp tubes, rather than the -back end- of the amp, it's power output tubes. Black Sabbath's distortion, for example, is almost entirely based on the latter, output tubes distorting. The knock on this is that most people couldn't play their amps at arena volume, which is what you have to do to get the output tube distortion.

Eddie van Halen essentially stood on his head, technically, to get this sound out of his Marshalls in the clubs in Pasadena. He used dummy loads to soak up the power going to the speaker cabinet and a Variac, a voltage regulator, to change the power the amplifier saw and make it's output tubes roar more.

Mesa-Boogie developed lines of amplifiers that generated intense and very tight distortion through cascaded pre-amp stages, the exact opposite of the first approach. It really caught on with metal players, particularly, Metallica. The amp lines evolved even more to give one, essentially, insta-raging metal distortion simply by plugging into the amplifier and a huge number of the bands in heavy rock use this in clubs, records and on the big stages now.

It produced a very noticeable change in style although it's probably not particularly important to the average slob. Output tube distortion requires more work from your hands and attack. Undoctored, it's more dynamic, but not necessarily better, depending on your taste. "Modern" distortion is stiffer in dynamic, which lends itself to many types of metal music the kids like now. However, the two types are not mutually exclusive. A good guitar player can get to either using old or new.

Heheh. I had actually written about 3 paragraphs about Fender, Marshall and Mesa but then decided my post was already too fucken long.

Though I agree about Mesa "inventing" or at least ushering in the hugely compressed multiple gainstage distortion, you could even make it a little simpler and say that the addition of the master volume to many amps around that time (and the rise of preamp distortion in general) was the beginning of the "modern" thing.

Dammit now I'm pissed I'm at work and not at home playing guitar.

Yeah, agreed. My old amps surely weren't built to deliver the exciting metal sound on demand. The British had the Dallas Rangemaster. I had an Electro-Harmonix LPB-1.

We're heavy metal, OK? Heavy Metal, Heavy Metal, Heavy bloody Metal.

Just like your fuckin' head.

Same here, good stuff!

Yeah, the Lizards. "Cold Hearted Kings." Last album, "Rule," featured John Garner, dug up from Sir Lord Baltimore, to sing. New album sacked him and it didn't hurt, as far as I can tell.

The Navajo Code Talkers, who I've mentioned briefly elsewhere. Quebecois biker rock led by girls. The guitarists have a Link Wray thing going on, which is greaser right from the original source. This year's/last year's "Vanilla Fudge" records. The Zolar-X archival release.

Most metros in the US have at least half a dozen such bands, most of whom have done or do their own releases in this vein. Poobah comes to mind, too.

!!!!!

Why was I not informed?! Greatest drummer-who-sings EVAH!

From the description for this Iron Magazine record. Applies as well to the frankly superb Aktor - Paranoia album also from Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen (with Chris Black of Dawnbringer in this case.)

https://ironmagazine.bandcamp.com/album/queen-of-hell

Can you cite examples of this nexus / original stuff that sounds like this, well known or obscure?

^^^

"...lazer-buzzing, intergalactic HARD ROCKIN' at that nexus of 1980 where greasy 'n' galloping heavy metal, Sunset-strippin' hard rock, and space-cased AOR all crossed DNA for one brief moment."

Tried to start a thread but it wasn't having it. The AOR element is also important.

the frankly superb Aktor - Paranoia album

sidestepping your question, but i LOVE that aktor album.

can't search for anything atm, but i started a thread some years back about aor dino rockers making "new wave" styled pop albums c. 1981 (e.g., blue oyster cult's cultosaurus erectus). iirc, some of the suggestions made would fit in pretty well here.

So you did, it was even bumped recently. I'll have a look through that, thanks.

1981 = year of 70s dino rockers w modren/wavo comeback LPs

the quote from the queen of hell bandcamp page makes me think of stuff like nazareth's no mean city and priest's british steel

I'll use this to post about High Spirits again, love this band and fits this:

https://highspiritsmetal.bandcamp.com/album/motivator

otm (for contemporary echoes of these psychic wars, anyway). was gonna say i think of aktor's paranoia as a chris black joint more than a circle peeps poject.

hawkwind - levitation

are we sure this Iron Magazine isn't a Ween side project? talk about self-aware

i guess if it were ween the tunes would be better tho

Mastodon have been retreating backward from heavy metal to hard rock in recent years. There's a song on the new album that's basically .38 Special.

xp danko jones always bring that vibe. have some friends who like them. i don't.