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Rock music: with or without keyboards?


daveiv

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4 minutes ago, daveiv said:

Do you have a distaste for rock music when it involves keyboards of any kind?

I know there are rad bands with keyboards, but I'd like to hear your preference.

It depends. I think Faith No More's utilization of keyboards is magnificent and adds to the music. There is a bunch of Ozzy stuff that has keyboards to enhance the music.

Since I am a guitar player, I always feel the guitar is the center of it all ?

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21 minutes ago, hockeyjx said:

It depends. I think Faith No More's utilization of keyboards is magnificent and adds to the music. There is a bunch of Ozzy stuff that has keyboards to enhance the music.

Since I am a guitar player, I always feel the guitar is the center of it all ?

How about something stands out a little more, like in this pop rock piece?

 

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I remember a segment from Behind the Iron Curtain where a fan asked Bruce Dickinson about adding keys to Maiden and his answer was unmitigated: You can't play heavy metal with synthesizers.

Of course, when the next album came out, they'd brough in guitar synths and by the following one, actual keyboards.

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I just learned an interesting piece of trivia. The first person that came to mind was Tom Scholz for "hell no" to keyboards; that was sort of the claim to fame for Boston. Then I just saw from this site: "Boston’s beginnings go back to 1969 and a band headed by guitarist Barry Goudreau called Mother’s Milk. Vocalist Brad Delp and drummer Jim Masdea were joined by a recent MIT graduate, Tom Scholz on keyboards. The band didn’t last, but its members spent time in a homemade recording studio in Scholz’s basement recording demo tapes in hopes of making a new start." Never knew that, but makes more sense in a way.

For me personally it is more about how everything fits, as with all things, rather than the instruments used.

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8 minutes ago, mettelus said:

I just learned an interesting piece of trivia. The first person that came to mind was Tom Scholz for "hell no" to keyboards; that was sort of the claim to fame for Boston. Then I just saw from this site: "Boston’s beginnings go back to 1969 and a band headed by guitarist Barry Goudreau called Mother’s Milk. Vocalist Brad Delp and drummer Jim Masdea were joined by a recent MIT graduate, Tom Scholz on keyboards. The band didn’t last, but its members spent time in a homemade recording studio in Scholz’s basement recording demo tapes in hopes of making a new start." Never knew that, but makes more sense in a way.

For me personally it is more about how everything fits, as with all things, rather than the instruments used.

Just to clarify, Tom NEVER said "hell no" to keyboards (quite the opposite actually).  However, he DID say "hell no" to synthesizers and computers.

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It's amusing to think back on those days. As a metalhead, I know that we had a lot of disdain for almost anything with synths, or anything where the guitars weren't distorted. Or even anything you could dance too.  It was "music for girls", and if you as a guy listened to that sort of music, well... 

The gap between punk and metal was nothing by comparison, and the prejudice against synths and drum machines lived on for quite some time. Who would have though that a band like Depeche Mode would end up being one of my biggest influences... 

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I'm one of the many old pluckers here who learned to love rock music before it got separated into 1,037 different genres.
Pop radio in the sixties had a lot of keyboard in it; organs, pianos, mellotrons, so I liked them from an early age, no matter the type of music. Plus, the first instrument I ever tried to learn how to play was my grandma's Hamilton piano.
I say WITH! But you don't have to.

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Remember Queen and their motto "no synthesizers were used on this record" ... until they started using synthesizers.

I never knew quite what they thought  they were saying with this, but it always seemed a bit childish and closed-minded to me.

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