Jump to content
Monochrome Heaven is closed. We have moved to JROCK ONE.

ICEMYLIFE

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    3

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by ICEMYLIFE

  2. Posted

    On 8/7/2020 at 3:30 PM, Himeaimichu said:

    I was actually wondering this myself. There are a lot of cliche musical elements in 90's Visual Kei that I can easily point out, but don't know the music theory behind because I'm barely a musician. There are certain drum beats, chord progressions, scales, effects, vocal techniques, and more that have become cliche in Visual Kei.

     

    One notable example is what I call "THAT" Visual Kei chorus. It's not really one thing, but a combination of factors that come together. Mainly the drum beat and chord progession.

    Compare the chorus of these songs:

      Hide contents

     

    These aren't the best examples, but they're the first that comes to my mind. From what I've seen, it seems to be a synthesis of influences from Luna Sea, G-Schmitt, BOOWY, Zi:Kill and whatnot, but I really don't know which artists made it "cool", per-se, probably Luna Sea. They don't all use the same chord progessions or drum beats, but they revolve around similar ones.

     

    Then there are the pinch harmonics. (This is where my super basic knowledge in playing guitar comes in). For those who don't know what pinch harmonics are, they're when you lightly touch the guitar string with your thumb joint while picking a note, in order to get a higher pitched sound. In Western Rock, these are referred to as "squealies" because they're often used to make high pitched squeals. In Visual Kei, however, they're used as ornaments to a riff that basically shift around the octaves of the notes.

    I would say this started as mainly a glam rock thing, as BOOWY implemented it occasionally in songs, such in the bridge of LIKE A CHILD (which has also influenced Vkei in other ways)

      Hide contents

     

    Also taking inspiration from Glam Rock, but adding in Punk and Metal twists, COLOR probably were the ones that made these kinds of pinch harmonics cool. This kind of guitar work would appear in both Free Will and Extasy bands, such as Kamaitachi, Zi:Kill and Gilles De Rais

    Gilles De Rais probably heard the COLOR and BOOWY songs, and thought that these pinch harmonic would blend very well in their mix of Horror Punk, Thrash Metal and Goth, and man they were right

    Kuroyume also played a role in making pinch harmonics cool, with early songs like &die prominently featuring them

    Fast forward to 1999, and by then, it had become a full fledged cliche, giving us songs like Zan

    And even today, pinch harmonics in this style are called for when you want to make a song sound extra 90's.

     

    There is even more that I could go on about, but I'm nowhere near an expert in any of this lol

     

    Good analysis. By "that chorus" I thought you'd mean the Rosier style chorus where the guitars make a very brief pause at the end of each bar, then if you listen to the guitar solo in that song you'll hear a million songs that seemed to be influenced by it, Driver's High by L'arc En Ciel is just the example of the top of my head. I'm actually not sure if Luna Sea was the first to do these, if anyone has earlier examples that'd be cool.

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRLkiX-NZzE

    Himeaimichu reacted to this
×
×
  • Create New...