TOSIN ABASI - Talks Progressive Metal Concepts and Philosophy

lot of my old friends think of me as a jazz guitar player because i was a jazz guitar professor in my 20s but friends that i've known for the past 25 years think of me as a kind of a metal producer because i produced metal bands for years and if you look behind me you see a lot of high gain 100 watt amps i also use amp simulators like the helix the ax of x3 and amp sim plugins like the neural dsp pliny and abbasi amps and of course abbasi seven-string guitars so to discuss this idea whether progressive metal heads are more open-minded to other genres of music i decided to call up my good friend tosanobasi and talk about it okay so i'm recording now hold on i'm recording i have my phone right here too that i'm recording on okay so you probably got it right you got it you look great man [Laughter] all right so i didn't do any research rick you don't need to do any research we're just gonna we're just gonna improv here we're gonna jam tosin you and i talk all the time we talk about a lot of different things but one of the topics recently that i was discussing with you is whether you think that people that play metal or let's say progressive metal are more open-minded than your average musician i mean my intuitive responses yes that's kind of that's kind of a leading question because you know that i that's actually my premise is that i think that people that are into the progressive metal movement are much more open-minded about other genres of music yeah look i think open-minded it's double-edged because from there's kind of a persona that can come with being a metal head that is like you definitely don't crank adele as you're like rolling down the street um because it's almost contrary to like the persona but i think progressive metal is is musically challenging [Music] it's diverse in its range of expression [Music] dynamically it i mean it asks a lot of the listener [Music] and so intuitively it makes me think that if someone's a fan of that they have like i think a bigger appreciation for music in general let's talk about the harmonic element first the type of chord progressions use the kind of lines that are used linearly with before we even talk about the rhythmic part or this the sounds to me progressive metal is the closest thing harmonically to jazz i mean a lot of the harmonies that you use not only are jazz inspired but you use things that you would find more in modern classical music [Music] you don't hear that in other types of rock and frankly in other types of metal when i listen to dream theater for example i don't hear those particular types of chord changes i hear a certain harmonic vocabulary that is to me more along the lines of traditional metal with some modal stuff with some modal stuff in there but what you do you use things like the augmented scale or you you will use different devices that you wouldn't normally find honestly you don't a lot of these things you don't even find in jazz it's more in modern classical music but a much more sophisticated harmonic palette yeah no i totally i totally agree with you i think jazz gets a license to explore western harmony to its fullest extent but it's a defined genre and a lot of people participating in jazz want to play by the established rules then classical music in a lot of ways has its own limitations to the harmony that's acceptable but within both those genres i feel like progressive metal is just free to poach all the harmonic content from both of those genres and there's no limitations on what you get to do in progressive metal so yeah i think that's that's you know in the harmonic category we we kind of we're validating that okay so here's the question how do you make that harmonic vocabulary work with distortion for example i know with you a lot of your more intricate things you don't necessarily play there will be things that are broken up into single notes that create the harmonic structure as opposed to playing static chords that are really dissonant although you do do that as well yeah you kind of you kind of nailed it i think because progressive metal oftentimes is guitar centered um you can arpeggiate voicings with distortion and it gives the contour of a complex chord that would be hard to merely just strum that chord with a bunch of distortion so all these lead guitar players get to sweep these arpeggios and you know you choose the right guitars you're going to hear some some interesting harmony outlined but it's not you know played as a chord and then the other device that a metal progressive metal gets away with using complex harmony is by layering clean guitar almost like you would a pad [Music] [Applause] [Music] so layering that on top of a distorted rhythmic part and you get to introduce harmonic content without that fight of trying to play that on a distorted you know instrument okay so why are you in particular interested in stretching out beyond traditional harmony and playing some of these more using some of the more not esoteric scales but unused scales and unused harmony than you would typically find in metal for me it's like personal taste i think i hear certain players and a light bulb goes off in my brain you know hearing alan holdsworth's approach to harmony and lead guitar playing it's an impact it's like you're like whoa what is this territory because i feel like for the listener harmony it highlights certain types of emotions so it renders in the listener if it's a minor scale if it's melancholy or sad or if it's you know you get the idea and i think jazz started this attempt to push that basic sort of palette of emotionality further but then you get into you know guys like holdsworth and various other you know progressive or fusion players and you're starting to get flavors that are very hard to pinpoint so for me as a metal musician i knew that the heavy dynamic was impactful i knew that the rhythmic dynamic the rhythmic expression is very impactful but i wasn't satisfied with like the basic harmony i was hearing because i knew how impactful harmony could be so for me progressive is like almost like going into space like expanding expanding comfortability beyond even like our planet you know what i mean and so these symmetrical scales and these you know these certain tonalities that i think you're hearing oftentimes in fusion putting them in metal you you can layer on this this really progressive sound it sounds beyond familiarity i want to want to dig into this holdsworth thing a little bit more holdsworth was actually harmonically outside the mainstream compared to most fusion players if i think of somebody like uh like the chick korea electric band or i'm trying to think of other people that you would consider fusion that they're not using those kind of they're not using the kind of harmonies i mean if i think of frank ambali playing with with chick [Music] they're still using a lot of traditional jazz harmonies right whereas holdsworth uses i mean they're not using the augmented scale or the harmonic major scale things like that that holdsworth would use i mean holdsworth was really out on his own with this i've thought about this there's prague metal in prague rock which is actually not as progressive as the title would legitimately it's almost like a snapshot of the like progenitors of progressive rock you know so you have your casts and your genesis and it's almost like as a producer you're going to hear certain synth generations you're going to hear certain types of tones in the palette that represent the genesis of prague and i think people carry that tradition and that's when you say prague you kind of refer to that then there's progressive like as a fundamental approach which doesn't have those parameters it's it's whatever you want it to be um so i feel like it's easier to talk about that type of progressive um because there's there's no ceiling on it and then when it comes to holdsworth um i feel that he impacted metal players and jazz fusion players um but he i don't think there's a lot of rock dudes and a lot of you know so eddie van halen he influenced yeah but you know i feel like that i think just eddie was just like tuned in to amazing stuff and wasn't trying to limit you know what he thought was good or not um but no yeah i might be i think for me focusing on holdsworth might be an example of like how little i may have searched for other dudes who have impacted i don't know that might but to me he stands on top as far as like pushing guitar harmony forward in a context that wasn't straight ahead jazz you know now you and i have talked about para nilsson for example if you look at his youtube channel some of the tunes that he's played over he'll play over i believe non-brood condiment which is a holdsworth tune that he he solos over and there's a pat matheny song song for bilbao [Music] he solos over these traditionally fusion chord progressions but he's a metal guitar player yet he has the the the feel and the harmonic language in his soloing of a fusion player i'm thinking about it i feel like something happens with a very capable guitar player who starts with technique and is very very adept and then he's like all right what do i plug into this technique and you start to end up getting these metal guys who are first concerned with like maybe shredding and then they end up like ending up in a harmonic space that is as complex as the techniques they're using and then we go back to the fact that you kind of have to source that from jazz or classical music because it's not happening in reggae let's talk about your rhythmic concept and how you view rhythm in progressive metal or in your own writing and where that comes from so i feel like metal and rhythm have always been bad fellows because you can use the guitar as a percussive element and it's heavy you know you using syncopation um making the whole band become like syncopation is kind of a really effective way to communicate heaviness but the earlier days of metal those rhythms were a lot simpler and i think it's just like a natural evolution to like yearn for more complexity because there's a frenetic effect of doing very complex rhythms it has an emotional impact it's chaotic it's you know it's uh oh it can be overwhelming you know so i think metal is kind of concerned with impacting people and rhythm is one way to do it for me it was bands like the dillinger escape plan um canderia um between the buried and me and meshuggah is like the one metal band that i think created a whole new path forward as far as how to utilize syncopation as like a primary force of like like a song so i don't feel like i really created much i feel like i'm pulling from bands like meshuggah and and dillinger and stuff like that and it creates an appetite for the same type of complex rhythms so you can find it in indian classical music or you can find it in malian music is odd metered frog rock and there's some cool like post bop stuff that really gets into you know intense compositions so that's kind of where i started mutating the rhythmic part it was kind of the meshuga thing really to me that's what i find so compelling about prague metal is that there's this bringing together of all these different elements there's a rhythmic intensity there's a sonic intensity there's the um bringing in things synthesizers things that that traditionally you wouldn't find in metal bands of the 90s for example that uh that would be more rift-based uh and wouldn't have the sophisticated um you know drum grooves if you think of bands like metallica or something for the most part lars was a very simplistic drummer they generate their power from a lot of unison playing between the bass and the guitars with a straight drum playing if you think of and i think this you know some of it in the later albums you know the bob rock era if you think of you know sabotru [Music] whereas now you know in progressive metal there's a lot of really intricate especially in animals very intricate drumming that go goes right along with the uh with the guitar riffs but it's genesis is in metal and i think it's good we're talking about drumming because i feel progressive metal has some of the best drumming you're gonna hear like the demand for the drummer to truly exploit rhythm is is extremely high so when you were doing sad but true you know like i got this imagery of like a war march right you know and i think metal started with an emotive effect it had kind of this sort of this like war like a motive effect and i think progressive metal is more like this like science scientific approach to like stretching the idea of um the emotions you're feeling and instead of like compelling you to action with like a very conspicuous rhythm oftentimes it is like activating very cerebral experiences in your brain as you try to decode a complex rhythm and so i don't know if you know a lot of progressive metalheads they're not like really tough dudes they're kind of like they're nervous myself included i think it's very different than if you go to like you know a five-finger death punch concert or something like that see so prague yeah it's kind of this open-minded analytical exploratory sort of you know subset of metal you know that's a great great point there that the kind of people that listen to progressive metal i've my assistant billy is like that that's you know all of his friends are kind of the nerdy kind of guys that that love really intricate music i wouldn't necessarily consider myself a nerdy guy but i love intricate music and i love i love music that is heavy i always have i produced i've talked you know you know this i've always i've produced a lot of metal bands and um there's something about the power of of heavy riffing especially heavy low tuned riffing i i didn't really start i didn't start the trend of lower equals heavier but i definitely ride the wave i mean i think after a certain point of standard tuned metal riffing there's just began this this sort of progression of like maybe you go to drop d and then maybe you do you know you do c sharp standard and then you know you had guys like steve bai and john petrucci playing seven strings in the 90s you got your corns and your limp biscuits and supple tur and all these bands and um deftones and i think from that point forward the the the obvious consensus is that lower notes are heavier they just and i don't know if you think about this but if you listen to a lot of take dubstep or a lot of uh like trap but it's all it's all low tones yeah also all sub sub harmonics yeah very very low tones yeah but the metal head in me was kind of amused at the the dubstep ascension because there are people who i don't think knew they liked heavy music like raging to dub stuff and i'm like this is a breakdown this is you could replace those bass lines with a distorted guitar palm muting and you've got you're almost listening to metal you know but it's synthetic sound sources [Music] let's talk about your guitar recording setup for the new record we did a shootout i have a specific sound and and so um we did a shoot out of gear to kind of get that sound only to realize that the plug-in that i you know designed out performs all the other ways which i would try to get that sound um so it's a combination of the neural dsp plug-in with uh misha's company the ggd's got these impulse responses is the zilla pack so i think we're using those impulses speaker impulses with the the abbasi plugin those are the ones nali did right yeah so not only did the ones inside of the abbasi plug-in but he also i'm pretty sure worked on the ggd um yeah i think he did yeah i mean i don't know if you have that stuff but yeah i do yeah i do it's excellent it's excellent and i'm really stoked that objectively it works the best in the mix on our newest album i mean that's for me the most legitimate you know test of of the gear if it's like in a blind shootout you know you know you know what you want and it happens to be something that you design for that purpose so that's what we're using those irs um people i don't think realize i think these are still um hard for people to understand impulse responses and to me this is really the future of of guitar i think as far as being able to even if you're using a real amplifier head and going through some type of a box and then using an ir inside the computer irs are really really important that's why it's uh i was you know when i see someone like nollie that really knows guitar tones bass tones when he was starting to i talked to him about this when he was starting to make his irs i thought that was really great they need to be made by people that know how speakers work and i mean he has a really in-depth knowledge of this stuff he's he he is incredibly analytical when he when it comes to uh i don't know if you've seen him talk about any of this stuff but it's really interesting ollie's a scientist it's it's cool but he's also an insane guitar player he is [Music] it's rare that you get an engineer who also is an insane guitar player and knows what they want out of tone not just from a listening perspective but someone who could get on there and play so i think the net result is um some of the best irs out there if i'm being honest oh yeah they're killing it yeah towson let's talk about things that people might not know about progressive metal i have a pretty big audience on my channel if somebody were to say well what should we check out first or what are some of the things we should check out beyond you because obviously and people know you from my channel but talk about in general kind of some of the um you know some of the important records to check out or things stylistically that people might be interested in yeah yeah i think metal gets a bad rap as being or progressive metal it's like apparently you should be misanthropic and not a very happy person and you're like you know summoning the dark side and i actually think that um i've seen some studies that metal is really popular in places that have like high levels of well-being so so it's kind of counter to the the from the outside looking in it's counter to what you would think so places like canada and scandinavia right and i think there's also a correlation a positive correlation to iq so and i think this makes sense because progressive metal is oftentimes musically complex so you have a lot of rhythmic complexity a lot of harmonic complexity and if you can get past the presentation there's a lot of really stimulating musical content in there a lot of my jazz player friends like progressive metal that just is uh but but i think it's not just for jazz players progressive metal has something to offer in the emotional sphere and i i kind of feel like you know with movies they're like really sort of intense horror films do you ever ask yourself like why did someone make this like why did someone conceive of these really dark scenes and like put energy into rendering them for other people to consume and why do people consume it and i think basically the spectrum of human emotion incorporates some some dark complex elements to it and i think most popular music avoids a lot of that stuff unless it's like a breakup song and i think if you only consume lava pop stuff it's almost like you've never really got into horror films or thrillers or you know what i mean or action movies so i think metal carries that torch of like using music as a vehicle to express some of the the darker elements of human human psychology but as an exercise like not as like a thing you should go and do or like not that you necessarily necessarily feel like that but because everyone's had nightmares or complex dark thoughts at some point so i've always appreciated metal as like making that contribution to like what we can listen to you know it's interesting when i was a kid there was a show called dark shadows it was a horror soap opera it was on from 66 to 71 and the main character's name was barnabas collins he was a vampire but this was a five day a week horror soap opera that was on at four o'clock in the afternoon it had vampires werewolves witches warlocks all these things and it was and it had very uh moderate a lot of modern classical music really dark atonal music i did a video where i talked about the music from this show i don't know last year or so and i it made me realize that i loved horror movies and i think that i love modern classical music for the same reason that i always loved horror movies i think there's a thread of continuity for sure and if we take something like horror or thrillers or psychological thrillers you do have to set the mood for those scenarios and then the linearity of a lot of progressive compositions it's like you don't know where the song is going sometimes there is like a defiance of expectation there are these jolting switches of how long a musical phrase is i think music is always as a listener you have expectations of the song because intuitively we understand how scales work whether we've studied them or not and even phrases even meters feel intuitively you know more balanced than odd metered phrases so it seems like progressive metal is very interested in going in the areas of like um discomfort but not merely for the sake of like visceral discomfort there's a there's a mental deco like we're trying to decode where's the song going oh wait this is this is a tonal oh wait this meter's shorter than i thought it would be you know i think that has an effect that's akin to watching a kind of a movie that you don't know what's going to happen next and it's it's yeah i don't know i think it's the musical equivalent always what just briefly talk about bands that have progressive metal bands that have vocals and how they differ from instrumental bands musically there are bands like dream theater who i'm gonna use because i think there's obviously a lot of prague rock bands that are quintessential but i feel like dream theater came along and they're more metal than rock you know yes from the like the caliber of lead playing to the actual tones to how heavy some of the parts are so to me they're a progressive metal band that kind of is like found obviously foundational the vocals are like operatic they are virtuosic it's like a very small subset of men can sing like that the vocal range yeah it goes right along with the complexity of the music yeah so you the the vocalist has to understand the complexity of the song form and so um i think it's it's cool but it might be a reason why a lot of progressive metal bands end up instrumental as well because it's kind of hard to find that talent dream theater is progressive metal no one would challenge that but i think there are bands that are considered extreme metal that i think are actually progressive bands like the dillinger escape plan just define their own lane of of metal and it is extreme but it's extremely musical complex it's dynamic it so to me they should be listed as a progressive metal band and it's not for the the faint of heart but if you are um if you're up for it you know any one of their albums will like blow your mind you know and then you you mentioned meshuggah who i don't think ever set up set out to be a progressive metal band no they're just swedes who had their own vision of what metals should be i know they were huge metallica fans and then i think they mutated into this original thing and i know frederick thornton all the lead guitar player is a huge holdsworth fan so you're hearing literal holdsworth style chord pads and legato lines on top of this very complex heavily syncopated music it's fascinating though that that holdsworth is this person that was a big influence i would say on progressive metal yet he was from the progressive rock uh he cut his teeth in progressive rock and was a jazz musician as well that's the thing so i guess maybe just as a player he wasn't as concerned with genre as he was with just musical vision and he he kind of touched down in certain genres for for periods of time but eventually just becomes holdsworth and i think that is truly progressive so i guess it makes sense that he ends up being this dude we keep coming back to you know also as guitar players um i feel like there aren't a ton of guitar players who you can look at their lead playing and and know exactly what's going who it is yeah and then you can listen to their sound and you know exactly who it is and then you can also here's the thing with a lot of like amazing lead players it's not like you know what their clean tone sounds like but you know exactly what holdsworth's clean tone sounds like and his his clean tone and his harmonic the progressions that he played are so him i mean anybody that tries to do anything like that sounds like a like they are copying holdsworth yeah he staked that position out that vocabulary the tones that he uses clean his clean tone i would say is as famous as his as his lead tone i would agree i would agree so uh so maybe allen holdsworth is kind of the godfather of uh of progressive metal progressively play i don't know if he ever really like just gave us a riff he has no rips like that they weren't really metal riffs it's so interesting i think if we're really trying to find the genesis of this stuff we can't find a singular source because no i think it's everything from yes in genesis to dream theater to holdsworth to you know even metallica like because i think the metal part we can't separate from the progressive metal part and so it has some some lineage from metal i just think metal is a genre past a certain point doesn't limit you musically you're allowed to have an 11 minute song that doesn't repeat and you know what i mean right back to my original point that that progressive metal musicians are the most open-minded because they'll listen to an 11-minute song that has no repeated sections i think you're right man i i'm hard-pressed to find a better example of like musical with you know what i mean and it's easier to go down from something as intense as metal to appreciating other things versus being an opera fan and then working your way up to appreciating you know metallica or other cases so i think musical tolerance for progressive metal heads is it's kind of high you know just because i don't know i just think we're the smartest most you know open-minded there you go awesome tosin you're the man we'll uh we'll talk soon yeah dude that was fun good seeing you that's all for now don't forget to subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell that'll let you know when i go live and when a new video comes out give it a thumbs up leave a comment that's very important if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rickbeater.com follow me on instagram at rickbeat01 check out the new beatto ear 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Channel: Rick Beato

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Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, prog metal, progressive metal, guitar lesson, dream theater, djent, prog metal riffs, prog metal guitar, animals as leaders, prog rock, djent 2020, abasi concepts, abasi concepts larada, Periphery, dillinger escape plan, meshuggah, Plini, Neural DSP, axe fx iii, helix 3.0, john petrucci, fredrik thordendal, misha mansoor, misha mansoor guitar, per nilsson, per nilsson meshuggah

Id: QSECY4kPflc

Length: 33min 46sec (2026 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020