To Hell and Back
By frogcity on March 3, 2024 11:57 pm
I spent significant time pushing my composition skill to new levels by working through some interesting exercises in deceptive chord progressions, energy control, and modal borrowing. I was inspired along the way to infuse these ideas (but starting in F# Phrygian) into a metal context. I now understand why this mode is used for riffs, especially leads well to atonal stuff, but not really great for progressions in pure Phrygian with that awkward v° in the way which leads to a weak closure in energy sound if trying to use it like a V. I now need to go back and listen to some classic metal Phrygian riffs to hear more closely how they did it. I know in a number of cases they borrow from pop/punk chords to create the movement before going back to the Phyrgian riffs, but that is more hand wavey than really understanding it all. A couple times I wanted to do a different pop style progression but forced myself to try to make pure Phrygian and v° work leaning heavily on the melody, and I liked the challenge of that. I also tried both the bII style cadence as well as borrowing from major and the subdominant. There’s some bits in here that were kind of magical that were nice to hear all together, such as the part where the chords speed up and the guitars speed up one at a time had a really nice effect to it (very short effect, just one bar).
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