Progressive Song Structure

[Aris_Berd]

Hello everyone :D !!!

I am writing this forum to ask you about any Progressive Song Structure you have musically met, not only from DT or other famous bands, but also from your own writing work. Any pattern, trick or anything you want to share is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

-aris

[Drusillus]

Here is a popular prog-rock song structure:

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M

I think DT used that one for The Dance Of Eternity.

Of course another popular one is also:

A - B - A - C - A - B

:wink:

[Phred]

HA HA HA HA ---

Gold!!!

[Aris_Berd]

Here is a popular prog-rock song structure:

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M

I think DT used that one for The Dance Of Eternity.

lol, I don't think that Dance Of Eternity has that structure... It has this one:

A - B1 - C - D1 - B2 - D2 - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - B3 - N - O - P - Q

lol !!! It is something like a train but with similar wagons :wink:


Of course another popular one is also:

A - B - A - C - A - B

:wink:

I think that this structure is very popular at the pop songs (or at some rock ones). It is not very often at the progressive songs.

[Nick]

well..basically..anything that doesn't do this -

intro - verse - verse - chorus - verse - chorus - middle 8 - chorus (times 48 and fade out)

thats your basic 3 minute pop song

progressive songs have different sections, no 'real' verses or choruses as you know it...just compare songs like metropolis part1, home, dance of eternity, erotomania and such to those songs in the charts or even some of DT songs like as i am.
songs pull me under have verses and choruses and such, but it changes, its got interludes, different chord changes, riffs and stuff, thats what makes it progressive.

the song progresses into a story rather than a pop song with a fixed structure and no real story

thats the way i see it anyway...

[lighthouse]

lol, I don't think that Dance Of Eternity has that structure... It has this one:

A - B1 - C - D1 - B2 - D2 - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - B3 - N - O - P - Q

lol !!! It is something like a train but with similar wagons


LOL I really like "B3" in a song!!


Juan Pablo

[Aris_Berd]

well..basically..anything that doesn't do this -

intro - verse - verse - chorus - verse - chorus - middle 8 - chorus (times 48 and fade out)

thats your basic 3 minute pop song


Yea man....I agree with yyou to death about pop song structure !!!!

And you are right about progressive songs. However I have found many tricks, like the shrinking grow on the instrumental section on Fatal Tragedy.

[Tigerfolly]

Hello everyone :D !!!

I am writing this forum to ask you about any Progressive Song Structure you have musically met, not only from DT or other famous bands, but also from your own writing work. Any pattern, trick or anything you want to share is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

-aris

How to write a progressive rock song, v1.0:

00:00 - 00:50: Big, long, spacey, synthy, intro
00:51 - 01:36: General gist of the song
01:37 - 02:46: Some solos and stuff - this is where most non-prog listeners get lost
02:47 - 04:11: Singer sings something, or whatever it is that they do
04:12 - 05:31: The only real chord progression in the song. Called a "chorus"
06:32 - 08:32: Solos over various keys, time signatures, stuff.
08:33 - 08:39: Breakdown into the coolest riff ever
08:40 - 10:02: Change from that cool riff to something bland to solo over
10:03 - 10:44: B3 solo
10:45 - 11:16: French Horn (or anything you can find laying around) solo
11:17 - 13:22: Guitar solo
13:23 - 14:14: Singer wakes up, sings something again
14:15 - 15:34: Another one of those chorus things
15:35 - 17:00: Singer goes home. Solo until it fades out
17:01 - 18:43: Lots of synthy sound effects and stuff

18:44: Get signed to Magna Carta. Release album. Watch the money and bitches roll in.

62:44: Still waiting...

[lighthouse]

00:00 - 00:50: Big, long, spacey, synthy, intro
00:51 - 01:36: General gist of the song
01:37 - 02:46: Some solos and stuff - this is where most non-prog listeners get lost
02:47 - 04:11: Singer sings something, or whatever it is that they do
04:12 - 05:31: The only real chord progression in the song. Called a "chorus"
06:32 - 08:32: Solos over various keys, time signatures, stuff.
08:33 - 08:39: Breakdown into the coolest riff ever
08:40 - 10:02: Change from that cool riff to something bland to solo over
10:03 - 10:44: B3 solo
10:45 - 11:16: French Horn (or anything you can find laying around) solo
11:17 - 13:22: Guitar solo
13:23 - 14:14: Singer wakes up, sings something again
14:15 - 15:34: Another one of those chorus things
15:35 - 17:00: Singer goes home. Solo until it fades out
17:01 - 18:43: Lots of synthy sound effects and stuff

18:44: Get signed to Magna Carta. Release album. Watch the money and bitches roll in.

62:44: Still waiting...


LOMAO!!!!! :twisted: ......this is so f$!$%%&ing great!!!


Juan Pablo.........still waiting..........................

[Deceit]

Take a Symphony X song.
For example:
Of Sins and Shadows.
Structure:
Intro (longer than 10 seconds :D) - Verse - Bridge - Chorus - Verse - Bridge - Chorus - Interlude - Solo - Chorus

NOOOOO! Twice the same structure, plus a bunch of words and solos! OOOH! This is no prog! This is salsa & merengue! This is R'n'b-ish POP!

Take a Rush song.
For example:
Subdivisions.
Verse - Verse - Chorus - Keyboard Solo - Verse - Verse - Chorus - Keyboard & Guitar Solo.

Hey, WARNING! Half of this song is what you described as POP! OMGOMGOMG! So what are Rush? Pop?

RUSH are, for your own culture, the DEFINITION of PROG ROCK.
Dream Theater (check the Majesty demos) have ALWAYS loved Rush, and you can hear heavy Rush influences in the first 3 albums - that, in fact, are the reason why Dream Theater have so many fans today.
*Don't* tell me that if Dream Theater came up one day with "Scenes from a Memory" or "Falling into Infinity" they would gather the crowd they have today standing under the stage.

Progressive is an attitude you have to FEEL inside. Progressive is experimenting BUT NOT ONLY experimenting, and this doesn't EXACTLY mean doing ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ songs. Progressive is technique BUT ALSO feeling. There's no real definition for Progressive actually. It's something you have to FEEL. You can do A1B1C5D4E2 songs and come out with rubbish. You can play solos at warp 9.5 and still be as prog as Avril Lavigne - but teenagers will hate you 'cos they'll get bored.
Oh and, by the way: Pull Me Under is the model of a GOOD PROGRESSIVE METAL song. Dance of eternity is the model of a SHOW OFF I CAN PLAY REALLY FAST song (after Jordan's piano solo it's damn hard to go on with the listening...).
Not that I don't ADORE the technique that Jordan puts in the song.
But Dream Theater hasn't written a chapter in the bible of Prog since 1992. Just a couple of lines in 1993 and a small note in 1995.

Prog is a mystery and is all about changes, and is in the end music that turns on your mind. There's no progressive structure, because progressive isn't a structure, something you can bound into chords nor scales nor modes.
If you feel you ARE progressive, just write what comes into your head, and you will know what a prog artist would put here and there.
If you don't feel like this, just listen. Listen to a whole lot of prog bands - and NOT only prog metal. Kansas (Leftoverture), ELP (Tarkus), Yes (CTTE), Rush (2112), just to name a few of the best known!

It's futile to say IMHO since I strongly believe this IS progressive and no further word is needed.
Deceit.

[lighthouse]

I totally agree with you Deceit....prog rock is more a "way" of looking at music, not a formula....you can analize some bands and copy what they do but doing it that way you`ll always end up sounding like someone else, and that`s not the idea. If you really love prog rock it`ll come naturaly if you just write your music with passion and feeling....You can use some things other bands use, as a tool and source of inspiration of course, but not base your music in that, saying: "well I did a complex scale here and a strange chord progression there, I used hammond an mellotron and a couple of complex time signatures, so I must have writen a prog song"

Juan Pablo

[Aris_Berd]

You are right!!! I totally agree with you. But, you should know that no person who can now write progressive music, one day stant from nothing and said: "OK, now I am going to write the best prog song". I mean that in order to write good prog songs, you should have great experience and talent. I think that talent isn't an attribute. You can develop a talent. That's why we are talking right on this forum: to develop our skills in order to become great musicians (what am I thinking hmm??). For example, when I started writing a prog song a found out a pattern that I love later. Look:

After the first time that voice comes to the song I take two riffs: A and B
These riffs are with two varietions A-large, A-small, B-large, B-small.
So, after the vocal riff I put A-large - B-small - A-small - B-large.
All that pattern was perfect after I managed the tempo. A-small was exactly the half of B-large and the same goes with B.
Riff A(both small and large) had voice

Thats a pattern I invented after writing a song. I hope you'd like it !!!!

-aris

[Airspeed]

-aris[/quote]

How to write a progressive rock song, v1.0:

00:00 - 00:50: Big, long, spacey, synthy, intro
00:51 - 01:36: General gist of the song
01:37 - 02:46: Some solos and stuff - this is where most non-prog listeners get lost
02:47 - 04:11: Singer sings something, or whatever it is that they do
04:12 - 05:31: The only real chord progression in the song. Called a "chorus"
06:32 - 08:32: Solos over various keys, time signatures, stuff.
08:33 - 08:39: Breakdown into the coolest riff ever
08:40 - 10:02: Change from that cool riff to something bland to solo over
10:03 - 10:44: B3 solo
10:45 - 11:16: French Horn (or anything you can find laying around) solo
11:17 - 13:22: Guitar solo
13:23 - 14:14: Singer wakes up, sings something again
14:15 - 15:34: Another one of those chorus things
15:35 - 17:00: Singer goes home. Solo until it fades out
17:01 - 18:43: Lots of synthy sound effects and stuff

18:44: Get signed to Magna Carta. Release album. Watch the money and bitches roll in.

62:44: Still waiting...[/quote]


Sounds alot like the structure of a Spock's Beard song. Funny stuff, great topic !!! :D

[VintageMan]

i think the fact that characterizes the progressive style is the lack of a set and predetermined structure.

[Bastardo Demono]

play more then one chord

[Tusker]

The problem of form:

How to make any piece longer than 3 minutesboth cohesive and interesting?

Classical (formal) forms typically rely on sections (movements) and development to achieve these goals. Prog attempts these techniques in some cases, but typically simply focuses on interesting sectionalization. Most prog musicians are untrained in composition and form.

It's only knock and knowall, but I like it.

Jerry

[Harmonic Paradigm]

In my honest opinion, i would say that progressive rock can be classified as anything that has such a feeling hidden behind the images and words of the song, that makes you feel something that you never feel with any other songs. Something you can fall into... infinity if you wish... i mean when you listen to something mainstream, its bang bang i am depressed, and then its over.... listen to a progressive song, and you feel something special inside... its easy to relate to words that some dude is screaming, but to truly except the feeling that you get from the music, the chord progressions, passionate solos... a true techincal masterpiece... you know you are listening to a progressive song...it happens to be the only thing i can listen to

Feeding The Wheel
-Ryan

[Liquid Shadow]

Why are people always so hung up on defining how to "be prog?" Good music is good music, regardless of how "prog" it is. There is good metal, good rock, good prog rock/metal, good jazz, good fusion, good classical (in all the different time periods of it), and even *gasp* good pop music. There is good music in any genre, and just as much bad in each as the other. People need to focus more on just making good music instead of confining themselves to being "prog" because that is somehow "better" than other music. So what? Good music is good music, regardless of the genre it would be classified under.

[pHaTaL_eRrOr]

Why are people always so hung up on defining how to "be prog?" Good music is good music, regardless of how "prog" it is. There is good metal, good rock, good prog rock/metal, good jazz, good fusion, good classical (in all the different time periods of it), and even *gasp* good pop music. There is good music in any genre, and just as much bad in each as the other. People need to focus more on just making good music instead of confining themselves to being "prog" because that is somehow "better" than other music. So what? Good music is good music, regardless of the genre it would be classified under.


Couldn't agree more... Hell, there are even some country songs I like.... and I've heard some increadible rap and R&B stuff, even though that's not typically what you'd find me listening to.

[Taurus]

Yeah I like some Garth Brooks and The Mavericks haha. I even have 3 progressive trance files of Marc Mitchell on my pc... Buts mostly or prejudice of his work and stuff, good ones, since he made an album for prog band Marillion once...

However, i think most of us here always fall back on progmusic being their n1 style.

[Liquid Shadow]

However, i think most of us here always fall back on progmusic being their n1 style.

No doubt about that. There's nothing wrong with having a preference to any style of music...that's just having an opinion, which is far from wrong. What's wrong is the people who think that prog is actually BETTER than other music (not that they just like it better) and they get way too hung up on being prog instead of just making music that they enjoy.

[Georges]

Considering that there are different bands out there and that each one of you here would say that they are more or less progressive metal (e.g. DT, Symphony X, Ayreon, LTE, Derek Sherinian, Shadow Gallery, etc.), there must be some traits in their music which make you believe that it is progressive, or not ?

This said, I completely disagree that progressive music would only be a matter of feeling and not of key constituents; that argument is actually too easy, for it avoids to provide a definition of progressive music. Nonetheless, we all perfectly know what rock, blues and heavy metal is. So why shouldn't we know what makes progressive metal what it is ?

May it be only an illusion that this or that song is progressive in our ears ? Possible.

Actually, Pull Me Under is a perfect example of a good HEAVY metal song. The only thing which makes people believe that it would be something new, something progressive are the keyboard lines, for in the ears of people heavy metal majorily consists of guitars and alike. There are many heavy metal songs similar to Pull Me Under, only without synths.

A supposedly simple song like Fear Of The Dark contains some ingredients that people would categorize as progressive. Is it the lack of synths or of odd time signatures which makes us believe that it is not a progressive metal song ? Or is it the fact that most people see Iron Maiden as a heavy metal band (even though many of their songs have supposedly progressive metal characteristics) ?

It all quickly becomes a philosophical question because no one really knows what "progressive" is. Therefore, some say that it is a matter of feeling, others say it's a matter of constituents, and journalists are inventing new styles each day to get the credits for having given the name to a new style.

Maybe it's the experimenting with the old, which makes a song progressive. However, that would renew the definition of progressive every 5-10 years because any experiments which become common use would no more be progressive. In that case, Pull Me Under and Home would have become heavy metal while songs from the new ToT album would be progressive.

For a little exercise, take a "simple" heavy metal song like Iron Maiden's Fear Of The Dark and try to make it progressive; experiment with it. What would you do ? Where would you start ? What do you suggest ? Will it sound progressive to you ?

P.S.: With this post I am suggesting that I don't know what progressive music is and I am certain that 95% of the people here do not know what progressive music is. When I started listening to DT, I was told or I read somewhere that it would be progressive metal. I always tried to understand why because in the end it does not sound so different from a heavy metal band with synths (apart from the show-off parts).

[Taurus]

Yeah it is like that..

Then why don't we just call progressive metal as 'heavy metal with keyboards playing a bigger role' in the meantime.
:wink:

[Deceit]

*Fear of the Dark*
I'd start from:
-changing the intro into something much more complex, extending the instrumental section with new arrangements.
-instrumental bridges (short or long, anyway...) between verse and chorus.
-if chorus and verse repeats, try arranging it in a different way, both by changing time signature (and in fact it happens...) and the style of bass/guitar (notes played, accents).
-solos in chromatic scale.
Anyway, remember that Fear of the Dark isn't really the heaviest of Maiden's songs. Not to say that it is prog metal, but the concept of heavy metal is something more straightforward.
Just a couple of titles for HEAVY METAL:
Judas Priest - Electric eye
Iron Maiden - Wrathchild
Judas Priest - A Touch of Evil *little bit of synths here - but it's still HEAVY METAL*
These are 2 of the best Heavy Metal songs ever, and there's no "IMHO" because those were the first, the origin, the birth, the concept, or at least they have been a guide for many bands to come. Pull Me Under is INDEED Prog Metal, the differences in the mood with a heavy metal song are CLEAR as soon as you listen to it: of course, the keyboard lines, but the guitar lines as well. There are Interludes. There are longer Solos. The lyrics, the whole mood is totally different. We say Prog METAL because there ARE strong differences with the rock part of prog. Metal means that the hybrid roots of this genre ARE Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath AS WELL AS Yes and Rush for the "prog half". You'd have to call heavy metal a big part of Dream Theater production, if you see it from this side.
Isn't Peruvian Skies heavy, after all? Compare it to Iron Maiden - Children of the Damned. They're both slow-beat songs with a strong chorus. There are other differences and similarities of course...but at first glance that's what I hear.
I agree with you, Georges, a song IS progressive, and you can recognize it by the attitude of the musicians, both in music and in lyrics.
However, that would renew the definition of progressive every 5-10 years because any experiments which become common use would no more be progressive.
Let's talk about sampled voices, harsh speaker rap parts *with style, because what rap artists lack is STYLE, that a certain Gildenlow has*, "overdrive" vocals...this remembers me of Pain of Salvation...not that they were the first, but their ideas are nice.
Compare it with ToT. There are more and more attempts in it. In the past, they were samples, now they have turned to lyrics...and I think ToT and progressive aren't supposed to be in the same phrase.
ToT is a nu-metal/metallica-wannabe album. All the nu metal shit out there is influenced by metallica. They start from metallica and take out nu metal. Dream theater as well starts from metallica and takes out shit. I think that, if we want to follow a band's style, we should better know who are they taking after. But it isn't honorable at all anyway.
In Georges' synth-oriented vision of music, in fact ToT becomes even less prog, because I can think of it without keyboards and still sounding the same. When I first listened to it, I said "Hey guys, where's Jordan? Ok, whoever pressed mute on the mixer's gonna get kicked in the ass.".
As a friend of mine says: "When we'll be there with Geddy, Alex and Neil on stage, there will be new TOT frisbees flying around...".
Oh, and I think I am that 5% who knows what progressive is...
To my beloved Liquid Shadow :* hey, good music is good music, but I like seeing good music performed well, which means you can't go out of the Classical-Jazz-Fusion-Prog-Metal-Hard Rock (before the 90s and maybe even half of the 80s, of course).
What I like to say is I listen to music composed with brain AND for my brain.
Deceit.

[Liquid Shadow]

-if chorus and verse repeats, try arranging it in a different way, both by changing time signature (and in fact it happens...)

The time signature doesn't change, it's just the feel implied by the drums. The first chorus has snare hits on 2 and 4, and the ones after that change to being on 3.

[Deceit]

Oh yeah, the accents...anyway, you see, such tricks draw tension and attention of the listener on the song...
In fact I've never played nor paid attention at time signature in that song...I only remember NOTB's first riff is in 5/4 :).
Deceit.

[Georges]

I agree with you, Georges, a song IS progressive, and you can recognize it by the attitude of the musicians, both in music and in lyrics. [...] In Georges' synth-oriented vision of music, in fact ToT becomes even less prog, because I can think of it without keyboards and still sounding the same.

Very probably, you have mistunderstood me. I have no vision of progressive metal/rock as I suggested in my PS. I was only considering the different views one might have but not at all representing those views and not implying that any of those may be applicable or correct.

Considering the "nu-metal" references in your post, that's a typical example of the style name creativity of journalists.

[Deceit]

Ok, so folks, have you listened?
Sop thinking progressive, turn off your mind, buy the first cd that falls under your sight *maybe Avril Lavigne will do, or maybe some r'n'b bitch half naked on the front cover* so you could really feel mr. "Beyond the vision and far above you". I don't buy nu metal cds, nor pop/grunge/r'n'b. I like music that enlightens my brain - and there's no brain in a mud of filthy sounds and performance imperfections.
Deceit.