Thanks for making this podcast. Overall, it was good, but you left out some stuff. It would have been nice to have some lyrics to go along with those samples to exemplify the typical themes of the sub-genres, as well as the typical vocal styles; the growl or "cookie monster" voice is frequently a determining factor as to whether or not a song gets thumbed down.
It would have been nice to hear examples of some of the terms used outside of the bigger samples. I'm not still not sure about aeolian mode, palm-muting, and arpeggios, and I would've liked to hear the chromatic scale compared to the pentatonic.
As far as the sub-genres are concerned, you left out speed metal, doom metal, folk metal, stoner metal,nu metal and probably some others that I'm not thinking of.

Personally, I mostly prefer power, progressive, folk, stoner, and the classics, but I also like a bit of thrash and speed just a little bit of death, but only if the vocals aren't too horrible and it has a good guitar melody (some Dethklok comes to mind.)

Thanks again. Any chance we could get a part 2?

Hi, Eric,

Thanks for listening. We definitely had to make some cuts (and some choices) to squeeze this all into one show, so yeah, we could only hit nine genres this time, and didn't delve into the lyrical content so much.

I could see a Part 2 down the road a bit, sure.

Not yet covered:
Speed metal
Doom metal
Folk metal
Stoner metal
Nu metal
What else?

As for the chromatic vs. pentatonic, and arpeggios etc., I recommend checking out some of our other episodes that go into those topics.

For pentatonic, look for "The Blues Scale with Bob Coons." For arpeggios, I recommend "Upright Bass with Seth Ford-Young." For chromaticism, the best is "The Guitar Riff with Will Redmond."

In general, to search all of our episodes by the musical terms discussion, there's this index:
http://blog.pandora.com/podcast/musical_terms_index.html

Thanks again for listening (imagine that phrase barked in a Cookie Monster voice),
Kevin

Great podcast. I was looking most forward to this one when you announced it was in consideration for season 2. I'm young student right now who listens to this music, and even people my age such as my friends have trouble understanding why I like this music. I thought it was a great analysis of metal, a music form many people often consider noise. You missed a lot of the type of metal I like but that is understandable considering how many "sub-genres" metal fans tend to like to divide themselves into. Overall, I thought it was really amusing to listen to music experts dissect the intricacies of a type of music I can barely comprehend sometimes(despite having to listen to it for half and 20 years on this planet).

Thanks, Geraint! Very happy to hear it. Indeed, there are some many metal variations out there, it's overwhelming. And, even for us, some metal is barely within our comprehension. (hee hee) That's part of its appeal, I think.

I enjoyed the podcast - there was definitely some cool stuff. But ome of the discussion on the origins of different genres seemed a bit off to me... And a lot of the musical examples didn't sound very indicative of what I think of when I think of those styles. And what was with the almost-clean guitar tone for some of the clips?

Great, great show! I really learned a lot. ^^ I'm just getting into metal, so I want to be able to talk about it with some knowledge... ^^;

A couple more things I would've liked to hear in the show: How is Metal different from Rock? (Is it a subset of Rock? Does it have different origins, focuses, etc.?) And where does Symphonic metal fit into these categories?

Thanx. ^^

I have to agree with what Jeff's comments were, but with every grain of salt I throw, some sweetness must fall your way as well...

First, overall, GREAT podcast! I think the genres you covered were accurately defined, even if not accurately demonstrated. The examples you gave on the web page are actually well chosen, I think, and makes me believe you "get it".

But let's get back to Jeff's comments above. What is the main difference between your listed examples and the one's performed? The guitar tone, and the guitar technique. Now I DO realize that you guys probably had limited time and possibly limited equipment to whip up these examples, but to be honest, they sounded more "garage-brewed punk" than "metal"...

Metal does not incorporate a spanky, shrill, twangy sounding guitar tone. Often times the guitar tone may be a bit on the high-mid side, but it is also rounded and filled a bit with some low end (typically focusing at or around 100 - 150 HZ). I know that may be a bit nerdy of me to say, but the TONE is one of the major differences between your performance example and your referenced examples.

The other major difference is technique. When you start delving into more extreme genres of metal, like thrash, prog, and sometimes death metal and grindcore, the artists take great pride in their rhythmic abilities. Bands of those genres are typically very TIGHT. You have to be in order to play 32nd notes at 130 - 150 bpm with heavily distorted and compressed guitars. Perhaps you guys would have sounded "cleaner" if your guitars were a bit more distorted, using at least a variant on the standard "scooped" tone?

Anyway, I don't enjoy being a "hater", because I absolutely love your show, and will continue to listen to it religiously.

Excellent show with excellent information. For once I wasn't mostly in the dark about the show's content, so I have some notes.

Since you mentioned black metal as a subgenre of death, I think "fantasy" metal or that particular discussion should be presented under the umbrella of power metal (Sonata Arctica, Dragonforce, Hammerfall, etc.). Technical black metal (Necrophagist, Nile, Cryptopsy, etc.) is usually well-produced now because of its specific nature, contrary to earlyish black metal (Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Emperor).

Also I don't believe Swedish melodic death metal (in the vein of Carcass, Arch Enemy, In Flames, Soilwork, etc. big timers) should be confused for lord of the rings metal by anyone seriously having this discussion (most super theatric and/or goth bands aren't from Sweden anyway, but instead other close countries like Norway and Finland). I also don't quite agree with the terminology switch from heavy metal (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest) to power metal.

I enjoyed the examples and I felt the intentions were dead on, and have no real complaints not already mentioned. Thanks again for a great show and website. Also thanks if you actually read this.

I really liked listening to this, but agree with that it would have been nice to hear some lyrics with the examples to better define the categories. I would also like to learn more about Symphonic Metal, as was also mentioned by a previous poster.

I'd have to disagree a little with the grouping of Metalcore and Mathcore. I think they are distinctively different from one another. From my understanding metalcore is a combination of metal music with hardcore music, so bands such as Killswitch engage & Unearth. Mathcore is more polyrhythmic and dissonant, more technical metal such as your listing of the Dillinger Escape Plan and others like Converge.

Excellent podcast and it makes me hungering for more! For the next one, i think there should be room for some industrial metal. Bands like Ministry and Fear Factory have had quite some impact on the metal scene and i still enjoy listening to their classic albums.

One (small) note of criticism; the section on Black Metal is not very informative on the musical/sonic specifics of the genre. And that's just the genre I enjoy the most! Perhaps a more elaborate description in podcast nr. 2?

Finally some metal on Pandora! I really enjoyed this one, although I felt the examples could've been a little better (guitar tone is key), and the genre differentiations are a little off (Mtalcore is not the same as Mathcore, and Power Metal isn't the correct term for what you described). Besides that, I would've liked some vocals, and some more specific genre descriptions (the descriptions were quite vague and seemed on the spot). There are quite a few genres you didn't cover, but metal is quite a large category, and you can't get it all.

before i start i just want to say that this was really cool a lot of people dismiss metal most of the time as just noise, but you guys did a good job at just scraping the surface of metal. i dont want to beat the horse here but a deeper look into the different divisions would be nice perhaps you could section them off and do one at a time if its not too much work, but i agree with everything that has been said so far but i've got one thing to add in a lot of metal bands more so in heavy genres (i.e. death metal, mathcore and nu-metal) drummers use a lot of blast beats and they are an intregral part of the song and you guys passed right over them. i'm a metal drummer and i really enjoy doing blasts they are fun and add a different sound to the songs and a lot of bands use them, the addition of that would make this closer to being complete. other than that it was a really good show. for more metal info you should check out a headbangers journey it was a rockdoc that VH1 did it was very indepth about quite a few metal sub-genres and gave a very good metal family tree with 30 mor so different sub-genres and time lines.

Great Show, deffinatly looking forward to part 2 :)

Hey, Just like everyone here I also agree that that this was a wonderful podcast to listen to. But I really liked that you left out the vocals because it let me have more of a feel of how instrumentally each of these sub genres are so different. I loved when Ava mentioned a little bit of the background info on the bands on why their sound is that way (the black metal staying away from the mainstream) if I could rate this I'd give this a 10/10 totally covered your bases well!

grindcore and metalcore/mathcore are not metal.

grindcore is a punk rock sub-genre.

You also forgot doom metal, gothic metal.

You also forgot electronic metal, but I saw some headbangers saying that there is no such thing as a metal genre called electronic metal, there is metal sub-genres called electronic progressive metal, eletronic doom metal......

You forgot also folk metal and symphonic but some, like with the electronic metal some headbangers say that they are not genres but various sub-genres like folk doom metal, symphonic power metal....
The amount of metal listeners that say that the symphonic metal genre dont exist is smaller than the amout of metal listeners that say that electronic metal dont exist, and the amount of metal listeners that say that folk metal is not a metal genre is even smaller.

where is the nu metal?

This was nice.But i didnt think the guitar tone was good,and the drummer was too loud!

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