Styles, Types, Genres........

Maybe someone here can help me. I remember when there was Rock, rock and roll, jazz, country and western, western swing, swing, blues, blues rock, country rock, big band, hard rock, soft rock, psychedelic anything, and a couple of other genres. Today I am totally lost. I once saw a sort or family tree of the music styles. It went on forever. AOR, Classic (anything), Metal, Death Metal, Nordic (Viking Metal), various Rock types, country types you name it and you probably named it.
Aside from loud, very loud, really loud, vulgar, funny, tragic, can't tell what there saying, are they saying anything at all or just growling, and many other quirks in the music, does this boil down to just Technique? Or is it a drop tune one finger rock song? There must be 209 genres.
G1619T

Originally Posted by: G1619TMaybe someone here can help me. I remember when there was Rock, rock and roll, jazz, country and western, western swing, swing, blues, blues rock, country rock, big band, hard rock, soft rock, psychedelic anything, and a couple of other genres. Today I am totally lost. I once saw a sort or family tree of the music styles. It went on forever. AOR, Classic (anything), Metal, Death Metal, Nordic (Viking Metal), various Rock types, country types you name it and you probably named it.
Aside from loud, very loud, really loud, vulgar, funny, tragic, can't tell what there saying, are they saying anything at all or just growling, and many other quirks in the music, does this boil down to just Technique? Or is it a drop tune one finger rock song? There must be 209 genres.
G1619T

I have no idea what your question is. Your first paragraph led me to believe you were looking for a list of genres. Don't know what your second paragraph is asking about. I think you left out the part where you tell us what genre you are referring to.

Do you have an actual question you want answered about something?

Yeah I am Getting Old,
Basically, is the genre type connected to different technique or style of playing?
Like metal: dropped tuning, down stokes (mostly) and single finger chords vs. classic rock(?) standard tuning, power chords (2,3 or more notes per), alternate picking. This is a simplification of course. Is this example a technique or style difference? Tone is involved here as are certain acoustic properties and other areas of the physics of sound. Older bands did not have the equipment we have today. Hendrix live sounded way different then his recordings. If he were alive today would he sound heavier; not louder. His technique was different from album to album but his style was the same. Maybe this doesn't make sense but, some songs in supposedly different genres sound the same or similar. What does AOR stand for anyway? Hold it, I'm rambling.
G1619T

Wow. Im lost sir..

I'll see you rambling and raise you an explanation:

The word "genre" comes from the French usage which meant "type, kind or sort". Basically it's a generalization of the style of music. The short answer to your post would be - yes, genres do have a correlation to playing style. Most of which are pretty obvious when you listen to them. Like you pointed out tunings and tones generally CAN distinguish a genre but they don't always place the music into a specific genre. For instance, you can have a band that plays all their songs in open tunings with slide and you would think that'd be country or blues... but depending on how they structure their songs, it may be rock or even metal...

Further, the things that are confusing you are what's called sub-genres. Their are countless sub-genres that have been created by artists to explain their music more exactly than a generalized genre... Some people might call their music Indie Pop, Indie Rock, Deathcore Metal, etc... Mostly this is an attempt by a band to sound different than someone else or to attract a certain type of crowd. In my experience, if a band doesn't know what the hell to classify their music as... or if they don't want to simply be called "rock" they just add the word "Indie". Also, ssame goes for metal... there are countless sub-genres of metal. Most of which all sound the same to me as well. But I'm not a metal head...

In conclusion, genrefication of music is somewhat out of hand at this point. Bands are constantly trying to find ways to seperate themselves from other people and trying to be different than their peers.... This has bred all these sub-genres that get thrown around.