This is by far my favorite Liszt piece. My favorite piano composer of all time is Debussy and this is like proto-Debussy
(Star Wars fans might recognize something John Williams borrowed in that Debussy piece for a certain desert sea score)
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Speed for speed’s sake (shredding) is one thing.
That is not what Yngwie is doing.
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Fast guitar is extremely fun to play, and sometimes not that fun to listen to. Which is fine by me 
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This times a million.
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I was working on Glass Prison the other day and my wife walked by and shook her head mumbling something like “I feel sorry for you”. I asked her why and she said “it just doesn’t sound good!”. Pretty sure that was a criticism of the music and not my playing. 
I guess it could have been both though! 
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Maybe you better figure out her tastes, and level up your bard skills! 
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Don’t assume. He could be eliciting the exact behavior he wants. 
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I guess she isn’t one of the 5 female DT fans worldwide.
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We’ve been married for like, forever. Or maybe it feels like forever. 18 years actually. We know what each other likes and dislikes.
She puts up with my weird music tastes. Back in the band days she came to all of our METAL!! shows, so she’s a real trooper.
I do owe her though. She wants to record some Christmas tunes. Fun diversion from all the virtuoso stuff I chase. Recording/arranging/producing/mixing is probably the most fun thing for me musically. I just stay away from it because it brings out the worst of my OCD tendencies lol! I’ve remixed things upwards of 70 times. I did have more time on my hands in those days though…maybe I’m older and wiser. Maybe just older though. We’ll see!
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This is how I am starting to feel about the guitar in general. It is like I have to jump through all the OCD hoops for what, more expression? I have 10 fingers I could be using to dance around a rigid keybed that can fret and pick a note at the same time. Sure I have to now do some glissando stuff on a synth to fake a bend or slide, but hey whatever at least I regain my sanity of not having to sync things up cause I have less fingers to work with on both hands that have to take up the slack of the hammer all because i grew up only doing plectrum picking. 
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Yep, I’m so committed to guitar just because it’s so fun and I’ve put so much time into it. If I had it all to do over again, I would’ve just stuck with piano lol Even though I never write anything anymore, I’m a composer at heart and piano is just so much easier to write from. I’ll stick with gee-tar though, especially after finding Troy’s site. I usually take longer than most people to really get stuff down, but once I ‘get it’, I make up for lost time. I feel like within the next couple years, maybe I’ll be there.
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Not only was Dream Theater influenced by Rush…so were their fans. 
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My mom loves Rush, and it was pretty much solely from me listening to them so much at home growing up.
Rush is so much more than just a ‘band’. Geddy had it right when he said “I think we’re the world’s biggest cult band.”
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My wife exactly the same! She’s a classical musician and likes rock, but she thinks shred guitar sounds bad. She’s quite happy to tell me as well! Lol But it’s not my playing per se, she just thinks in general it sounds bad! 
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I’ve heard this from time to time. My response is something akin to…
“Yeah? …and?” 
You gotta show her Jason Becker’s “Air” and see what she says. Conduct my “is it the distortion” experiment.
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As far as generational going back and forth on something being too fast - I think it boils down to some pretty basic psychology. For someone to enjoy music, they need 2 things:
- Be attuned to what’s going on so there’s some expectation of what comes next, and
- the composer has to understand how to surprise them, but not too much and not for too long before returning the familiar, and the familiar has to be catchy and recognizable.
Lorna Shore, interesting example, is pretty damn popular at the moment (don’t see a lot of Death Core or extreme metal in general playing Lollapalooza) and it’s like a wall of sounds half of the time, but they brought in a ton of symphonic elements along with demonic growls and massive bass - it’s almost like a video game sound track and I think that helps sell it.
But - a ton of people were reacting on TikTok to the extremely over the top vocal style towards the end of To the Hellfire - some making fun of it, others kinda taken aback and even in that subgenre it’s taken it somewhat further than other bands have. That grabbed people’s attention and the familiar elements from the symphonic were enough to draw in some disparate groups that aren’t standard deathcore fans.
So point being - if you turn that back to shred guitar - if you have a well placed shredy solo in a song that isn’t super long winded, and it fits well, is well crafted, and the rest of the song is somewhat dialed back, it’s going to have a much bigger effect than if you hit them with a wall of virtuosity and notes that becomes overwhelming - or in the times where that was popular, it becomes super predicatble.
A ton of people still think for example, the Beat It solo is incredible - and it is, but not for the sheer virtuosity, it’s very well placed, fits the song, and sounds super cool.
So why do we, as nerdy guitar players, get into long winded virtuoso playing? Because it’s something we like to do, and the surprises for us aren’t always in the overall flow of the music - sometimes we’re just looking for the next hot run because we’re so attuned and used to listening to that kind of playing that it’s not exhausting to listen to - we have a frame of reference for all of it.
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One more +1 here.
Playing fast is FUN. Is it fun to listen to? Sometimes. In the context of the right song it can be… but I also don’t expect to ever sell more than a couple hundred albums, so I’m going to play the stuff I think is fun to play and not lose any sleep over it.
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I like to watch Felipe Coehlo for this exact thought process. He will show the tricks to speed, but he says you can’t do it all the time because they will figure out what you are doing. You have to be super random, and surprise your audience with that virtuosic showmanship snippit section of the solo. I agree 100% with all of what you said, now if only I could figure out how to dial in or blend going from acid techno sequences to crazy shred guitar showmanship thing.
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