Synth Solos

It hit me that a lot of the songs I love have wicked synthesizer solos. so I thought I’d share.

Dream Theater – A Dramatic Turn of Events

I decided to wait a month before I posted my impressions about this album to really let everything sink in. The TLDR version? It’s my one of my favorite Dream Theater albums.

Dream Theater’s New Drummer

There’ve been a bunch of topics that I wanted to post about in April, but just didn’t have the time. Unfortunately, I only posted once throughout April and now it’s already May. Time to play catch up!

Five of My Top Played Tracks from 2010

I love Last.fm. It’s a music tracking site wherein users’ songs are “scrobbled” as they play them. Basically, you download a small app that sends an update to the Last.fm servers whenever you play a song. The site tracks things like the number of times you listen to a particular artist or song. Since 2011 just started, I thought I’d look back on 2010 and see my top played tracks.

On Dream Theater Losing Mike Portnoy

I can’t really imagine what lies in the future for Dream Theater, my favorite band.

Raw Dog – Time Signature

Dream Theater’s Raw Dog from the God of War 3 soundtrack has a very jarring introduction — the sound is extremely distorted and the time signature changes every bar. During a long car ride to Durham this weekend (Go Duke!), I figured out the time signatures, and it’s very strange.

|: 6/4 | 7/4 | 5/4 | 8/4 |
| 6/4 | 7/4 | 5/4 | 10/4 :|

Alternatively, it could just be seen as three 13/4 bars with a 15/4 bar as the fourth measure:

|: 13/4 | 13/4 |
| 13/4 | 15/4 :|

I prefer the first way though, since it’s easier to follow where the downbeat is.

Mutiny Within

So my post yesterday alluded to this album. The most fitting description of their sound is “Killswitch Engage meets Dream Theater”. They blend metalcore with some soaring melodic passages and they have the technical skill to go with it. My favorites on the album would have to be “Falling Forever” and “Undone”. “Falling Forever” has such a catchy chorus and the opening note by vocalist Chris Clancy is such a breath of fresh air. I’m a big fan of irregular time signatures and the 7/4 chorus of “Undone” is no exception. The trading 3′s and 4′s feel which gives it such a natural flow. I’ve read people here and there disapproving of the screams, and to some extent I agree. But at the same time, it does serve to shake things up a bit and provide contrast to the melodic vocals. Overall, the album is really enjoyable and like many others look forward to hearing more from these guys.

God of War: Blood and Metal

I don’t think there’s a good way to transition back to what this blog was supposed to be about… So I’m just going to try to push past it and move on.

Earlier this month, God of War: Blood and Metal was released. On it are six tracks from six bands signed to Roadrunner Records. Track listing is as follows:

Killswitch Engage – “My Obsession”
Trivium – “Shattering the Skies Above”
Dream Theater – “Raw Dog”
Taking Dawn – “This is Madness”
Opeth – “The Throat of Winter”
Mutiny Within – “The End”

Overall, this is an incredible EP. KSE and Trivium put forth some pounding tracks, both with catchy hooks. Dream Theater’s instrumental starts off very jarring: the meter changes every bar and it has a very uncharacteristic heavy and distorted sound. But the track evolves into some blistering solos. I really appreciate Myung’s bass line in this track during the chorus, if only because they weren’t as prominent in Black Clouds and Silver Linings. The only real outlier would be Taking Dawn’s “This is Madness” which quotes heavily from the movie 300 which makes it pretty hilarious. Opeth’s “Throat of Winter” sees a kind of (de?)evolution of Opeth’s sound: all acoustic with a meandering song structure. I personally like it as it makes the track very unpredictable. Akerfeldt wrote on his MySpace page:

At this point I’m complete and utterly bored with new streamlined music. Bored to tears by conventional metal arrangements. I think the future album will be more or less devoid of any fluid writing. It will be all over the place I guess, because that’s what I and ultimately Opeth as a band find interesting these days. I want it to be fucked up! I’ve written a 10 minute + piece so far and it’s miserable sounding (in a good way, for me at least) and quite disturbing. Don’t know whether it will make the final cut, but it’s certainly set the tone for what type of music I want to write right now.

so if the God of War track is a preview of what’s to come, I’m pretty excited for their next album. “The End” by Mutiny Within is a great track to end with. They’re a new band who just released their debut album this year, which I’ll be writing about soon enough (spoiler: it’s really great).

Rudess and…the iPhone?

Yesterday’s post about the continuum was really to just give a little background. I bought Black Clouds and Silver Linings, Dream Theater‘s newest album earlier, and it’s probably my favorite album of the year. There’s one solo, however, in “A Rite of Passage” that I just couldn’t figure out. It’s distinctly a Rudess solo because it’s just out there, but it wasn’t a regular keyboard solo or the continuum. So yesterday I had stumbled upon Rudess plugging Bebot for the iPhone. It’s an app much like the continuum in that you can slide around and play notes. Then, I found this video of the Rite of Passage solo section. Blew my mind.

Rudess and the Continuum

I really really wish I had seen Dream Theater when they came around my area. All of the members are simply the best at what they do. In school, one of my lab partners turned me on to them. At first, I just brushed them off, but on a whim, I downloaded Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory and my mind was blown. At the time of this post I’ve scrobbled over 3,800 Dream Theater plays on Last.fm.

The picture above is of Jordan Rudess, Dream Theater’s keyboardist. It’s a blurry pic, but it was taken with my cell phone as it was on the door of Lippold Haken, a professor at U of I. Haken created the continuum fingerboard, a midi controller with a smooth surface on which you can slide your fingers. The instrument tracks your x (the key, or in between keys), y (front and back), and z (pressure) and you map that to the midi output. It’s a fantastic instrument, and you can see it in action in the YouTube clip below.