Tremonti right hand

Playing Technique
#27

I haven’t actually listened to much of his solo stuff, more Big Wreck. What did you think of “Grace Street”? That’s a Randy Staub mix. All is know when @carranoj25 told me I should stop everything I’m doing and listen to Digging In, the first thing I thought “My GAWD that snare sounds good!”

Still my favorite Big Wreck tune :wink:

Then trying to find out who mixed it, I found out it was Randy Staub. It all made sense then lol! Similar to one of my other favorite snare sounds, the Nickelback tune “Animals”. Probably not pitched up quite as high but just a nice thick cutting snare sound. Mmm mmmm.

#28

Honestly I always forget about Big Wreck. I might be conflating the two, though? I don’t think his solo stuff ever sounded that different from Big Wreck, and maybe it’s their albums that have the dynamics crushed within an inch of/maybe a little beyond their life. I haven’t listened to any of his music for at least a year, so mostly I’m just stoked for the reminder of a great artist.

I’ll report back. :yesway:

#29

My god, Big Wreck is a great freaking band!! I still remember hearing The Oaf for the first time. There’s a live thing they did with Suhr guitars and the mix is phenomenal.

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#30

Well I’ve derailed this thread lol! It’s gone from “Tremonti right hand” to “Bands Everyone Hates But are Awesome…‘Proper’ Rock Vocal Technique…and Ian Thornley Rocks!!”

Here’s some cool playing from Mark

Similar to what @tommo said about not necessarily stellar hand sync in places. I think he tenses up some and we get some elbow at the high speeds, but honestly that’s normal (Andy Wood etc) at plenty of wrist players upper threshold. Some additional RDT down picking in there too.

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#31

To be fair (to be faaaiiiirr) this is the first Ian Thornley rocks thread I’ve ever seen…

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#32

You mean you don’t spend your sleepless nights perusing old forum threads like me??? lol!

Lol! Is that your Scott Stapp pronunciation? Ha!

#33

Letterkenny. If you know, you know lol

And if Ian was the singer in Dream Theater, they be my favorite band is the history of bands!!

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#34

As @tommo points out, Mark is a textbook reverse dart player and worth paying attention to for anyone who wants to learn that technique because he gets great results.

We see this commonly in TC. Lots of people use Mark’s form and can do fast downstrokes but not fast alternate. The tremolo is still wrist but simply a different axis, low speed, no power, and often garage spikes. For this type of player, understanding why their downstrokes go “away”, and simply using the same wrist motion for alternate is a powerful way around the mental block. Mark’s pure alternate speed in the clip @joebegly posted is a great example of what a reverse dart player should be able to do all day long with no fatigue when the technique is done correctly.

Mark is also a riff lord who has only gotten better over time. I haven’t followed what he did after the Alter Bridge ABIII album, but there’s some really clever heavy riff writing on that album, and also Blackbird which came before it:

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#35

Dang I’ve been missing out. Blackbird was the last thing of there’s I followed. Not sure why because I really dug that record. The mix on that AB III sounds amazing though. If you “A/B” it (cornball pun intended) against Blackbird (which also sounds great)…Blackbird almost sounds like there’s a blanket over the speakers. Same mixing engineer on both records too :thinking:

AB III is still not quite as good sounding as All The Right Reasons though lol

jk maybe it is…It’s possible I’ve put that recording on a pedestal.

#36

Ok, THIS is interesting. To me, ABIII is another example of an album that sounds over-compressed; the opening track, “Slip To The Void” is a great example, where there’s a sparse whispered vocal and clean/acoustic guitar intro, and then the band kicks in… and there’s no perceived change in volume. It’s already so loud that there’s not really any “room” for the volume to increase.

I need to check it out on Spotify on a good set of speakers some time, to see if there’s a different master between the CD and streaming, but the master was, to me, hard to listen to because of its incredibly narrow dynamic range.

Meanwhile, I loved the mix on Blackbird - something like “Coming Home” was absolutely huge, in part because the dynamics could still breathe a bit.

It’s wild how subjective this is (unless there really is a different streaming master and that’s the one you know better) - I’ve always enjoyed mixes with a bit of rawness and looseness to them, but the dynamics i figured would be less subjective. Crazy. :laughing:

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#37

I’m definitely weird in that I don’t really care about dynamics that much and focus more on tones/EQ. BUT I only listened to like the first 30 seconds of the AB III thing, so maybe it would get fatiguing if I went further lol

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#38

That’s great!

Blockquote “But I still think this is not done in a super exact way, more in a “rock’n’roll swagger / just go for it” kinda way :smiley: .”

Yeah I definitely agree, that’s one of the things that you think it’s very precise at fast speed, but in reality it might not be as clean or precise, it still sounds good tho, even tho it is supposed to have some string changes aswell.

#39

Great clip! Thanks for sharing

#40

Oh I love those songs, they are killer! And great insights on Tremonti picking technique.

#41

Yeah I’m like that aswell, guess they were going for a more compressed metal sound. I guess songs like Blackbird from the previous record do have a lot of natural dynamics so it is important to preseve them there.

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#42

My copy of All The Right Reasons has an extremely beat jewel case from how long it lived in my car (yes I skip photograph nearly every time).
Side of a Bullet is my jam.

Chris Cornell is my favorite 90s singer by a mile, and one of my favorites regardless of decade, he’s probably the only famous person in my lifetime whose death really affected me and losing Chester a couple months later made 2017 absolutely rot. And the worst part is I can barely listen to some of my favorites now because the lyrics hit way too hard now.
Layne Staley and Chino Moreno would be my next favorites followed by Serj Tankian and Jeff Buckley

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#43

ngl it does sound over compressed after comparing it to other stuff lol

#44

Yeah for me there are two seperate things going on, and IMO it kind of fails both of them, but the second is much bigger a deal than the first.

The first is simply is the use of dynamics in a song effective. For me, a really quiet intro that, when the song kicks in, it doesn;t FEEL like things got louder and more intense, doesn’t really work… but that’s subjective and I definitely get not everyone is going to feel the same.

The second though is if you’re actively listening to something, on a good stereo system or on headphones, over time a really flat, squashed mix is physically tiring to listen to, because your ear isn’t used to hearing anything with no dynamic range. The first album I had this reaction to was RHCP’s Californication - I’d never loved the band but a buddy was really ito them and used to play that album a lot when we were working together, and i could never figure out why I actually liked a lot of the songs but there was just something viscerally offputting about the album for me that made it hard to listen to… until a decade lader reading an article about the “loudness wars” that waa flagged as an early offender. :laughing:

But, also, some people just seem to be not very sensitive to that kind of stuff. I have a buddy who released a self-produced album that he absolutely brickwalled, and to this day new music he works on continues to be absolutely smashed (though he’s moved to doing more heavy-handed compression in the mix before he even moves on to mastering). He loves how it sounds, it’s very “modern” to his ears. It’s physically painful to mine.

I guess I’m just not that metal. :rofl:

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#45

ABIII? Yeah I mean the music is pretty good, I’d really love to hear it with a less aggressive master. :confused:

#46

I do definitely enjoy music that “breathes” a little. Tom Petty is one of my favorite artists and his Wildflowers album is one of my all time go-to’s. I didn’t know anything about audio engineering when I bought it in middle school. I just knew I liked the songs, and I think I took that approach with everything I listened to. Now I hear great tones, and sure, that’s not a squashed recording. There’s an “in the room with the band” vibe on the whole thing that I dig, and that would likely go out the window if they squashed it. There’s no “super quiet” or “super loud” parts though, not that type of recording.

It’s funny how knowing more about things changes our enjoyment though. “And Justice For All” was just so badass the first through the 1000th time I played it as a young teen. I didn’t realize there was no (audible) bass and the guitars had no mids. Same with Dimebag…I heard amazing riffs and the coolest solos in that genre imaginable. Now I can’t hear his stuff without being bothered by the mixes and his buzzy tone in general. Sort of a shame. Ignorance was bliss lol!

I’m wondering if the “fatigue” aspect of the more compressed stuff doesn’t bother me as much just because I don’t listen to things at a high volume in general :thinking: I know when people cite the fatigue they don’t really mean “it hurts my ears”, but the volumes I choose, I can normally still hear background noises easily. The wife/kid asking me a question, an email alert tone, my stupid dogs barking out in the yard etc.