This column today is about the main genres of music, and the kind of instruments and talent to play them.

Hard Rock

This genre of rock holds my favorite band AC/DC. Just listen to them and you’ll find why they call it hard rock. This requires some talent. For instance, if you listen to Angus Young solo, it doesn’t sound very hard sometimes. Then, you see him play live and he’s rolling around on the ground basically having a seizure; yet, he doesn’t miss a note.

This requires the basic instruments of rock. Guitar, bass, and drums.

Blues

This is where most of my influence comes from. It just sounds nice. This genre takes a fair bit of talent to master. Like B.B King. He was one of the greatest bluesmen of all time. He sounded very melodious. This is easily one of my favorite genres.

The instruments in this are basic, but have some interesting ones too. There’s, guitar, bass, drums, organ, and saxophones or other brass.

Jazz

Here is the smoothest of all the genres. It can be calm. However, I like it more when it’s really moving. This takes real talent to play. Just the drums are enough to frazzle anyone.

The most common beats are things like double time, double time swing, and ⅝ time. All very complicated. This genre has many instruments. Clarinets, saxophones, vibraphones, drums, and other brass and woodwind.

Metal

If you talk to most of the people I know, they’ll call me a metal head. That part isn’t entirely true. I like one metal band (Megadeth). Anyway that’s off topic. This really depends on the “type of metal”. Thrash Metal takes talent. You’re actually playing guitar. Regular metal is just the e and f power chords with a lot of overdrive and gain. Then there’s djent.

How I cannot stand this. Dave Mustaine from Megadeth quoted at one point, “It’s terrible. All they do is tune their guitar way down so you can’t actually hear what they’re playing.” The main instruments for thrash are guitar, bass, drums, vocals. Regular would be pretty much the same things. Djent however, has guitars with extra strings.(Jared Dines-18 strings, Stevie T-20 strings)