I'm showing my age here, because once upon a time you only had to worry about Pop, Indie, Dance and Rock. Now there are countless variations, and variations on those variations. If ALL music could be represented by a tree, what do you think would be the main branches, and what would the twigs be? I know this is a large exercise, but I need clarification.

A request pretty much identical to the one Raza made in that kick the moderator thread, and on that I took up. Belive it or not I am still working on it. It is rather a large project.

I can post some of the stuff I've done so far though, which I will do a little later, and edit them as I get more information or as needed/requested.

This is something I think anyone interested should take part in though, as alot of it is based on personal opinion. While say dance for instance would have a few core elements that everyone will agree on, there would be other factors that would make an album sound dance to one person, but un-dance to someone else.

TRUNK of the tree:
Rock ans metal

Main Branches:
Heavy
Glam
Thrash
Speed
Death
Power
Industrial
Black
Nu-metal/Mallcore
Doom
Grindcore
Extreme
Progressive
Classical

Twiqs:
Jazz
Rap
Rock
Electronic
Blues
Reggae
Folk
Pop
hip-hop

if i have missed any out plz add them

What about the roots?

That tree just screams white power, you've listed every African-merican based music form as mere twigs wheras the trunk doesn't even have blues in it, where I might add much of the rock music you added was originally spawned from.

I agree, where do you think todays music originated from?

That was a joke.

Well, the recent breaking up of music into 50 million genres became notorious after the grunge-seattle-movement, and after metal and electronica had become their own genres it just convoluted things. The genre itself, however, means very little to the music as much as the influences the artist has pulled them from.

Metal

Death Metal (Branch from Heavy Metal)

Death metal focuses on nihilisim or lack of preconceptions of belief, A preaching of knowledge that death is more real than human political mechanations. Intense focus on Rythm. Common guitar technuqies are tremolo picking and palm muting, with lots of single string use. Gutteral, growling vocals that are used as rythmically as any other instrument, almost like chants at times. Drumming has heavy focus on double bass useage, with patterns often matching those of the tremolo picked guitar, or other techniques like triplets and blast beats.

Death metal has a few sub genres of its own like technical death metal which has more use of scales and complicated manuvering around the fretboard and drumkit, rather than a more primative approach straight up death has, and melodic death metal which incorperates the favouring of melodic riffs untited with the primative or technical styles of death metal. basically using the same technique as straight up death to a melodic effect.

Black Metal (Branch from Heavy Metal, split with Death)

Black metal was birthed in three waves.

The term black metal was in fact created by a band caled Venom), more of an extreme from of the original heavy metal genre. Bathory blah blah more later

2nd wave bands include acts like Darkthrone, Mayhem, and Burzum. 2nd wave black metal has a very primal, primative approach without much focus put on articulation of an instrument. Drums often rely almost entirely on blast beats and derivitive punk 'bass-snare-bass-snare-bass-snare' patterns, the instruments presence is almost solely there to emphasise the violent and aggressive lyrical themes and ideas. Usually poor recording quality of tracks. vocals are more raspy screams than gutteral growls of its death metal cousin, and the guitars are less bassy, with more focus put upon a metallic, tinny treble sound. usually open tremolo picking of single strings, or speedy strumming of simple power chords.

3rd wave black metal tends to be looked down upon from the 1st and 2nd wave fans who consider it to be less 'true' to the genres original ideas and themes. lyrics are often totally conceptual, and much more focus on skilled instruemnt playing is put into use. 3rd wave bands reolve around melodious riffs and playing, and often feature symphonic instrumentiation made my keyboard synths or use of actual orchestras and/or chiors, though genrally they are emulated with the syth.

Grindcore (Later)

Grindcore is bassically a merging of death metal and thrash. a term put to things that are thrashy, but too death metal influenced to accurately be called thrash. later styes of grind are more death metal in influence than thrash, but played blindingly fast often using drum machines becuase most humans are not capeable of properly producing such speed, and with ultra-gutteral vocals, sometimes created with the use of effects if the vocalist isnt capeable of getting low enough or wants something even more 'extreme'

Thrash

Coming Soon

Heavy Metal (Big fucken branch attatched the the Blues/Rock section of the trunk)

A genre that was argueably solidified by Black Sabbath, but while it doesn't sound like heavy metal by today's standard the first heavy metal recording is often attributed to Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild (the use of the line 'heavy metal thunder' in the song ended up being used to describe the band's new sound), Led Zep's 'Communication Breakdown' has also been referred to as a heavy metal track (recorded in oct 68 - still a few months before sabbath started up).

Sabbath however, solidified what heavy metal would become. the term heavy metal has come to mean anything loud and distorted in mainstream useage, but amongst more versed fans of metal, its a reference to the beginnings of the metal genre in its entirety, bands like Black Sabbath, deep purple, and Judas Priest who came along and added speed and technicality to heavy metal when they released Sad Wings of Destiny in '76, forming solid influences for the later spawned genres, especially power and thrash metal.

Heavy metal has clean vocals and relatively simple, progressive guitar riffs and drum beats. usually equal focus is put on both rythm and melody, including a strong baseline that doesnt always copycat the guitars.

More later, Power/prog metal coming soon, with other twigs like viking/sludge metal when I can be arsed.

I might be spoiling your fun but if you want to cheat you can find a full list of all the genres right here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_genres

Yeah but being so widespread they tend to fuck up. For instance they make no distinguishment between black and death metal.

EDIT: Hey wait, they do, its just harder to see, and they call black metal bands death metal in other places.

well now that we kno them all we got to sort them out into branches twiqs trunk and roots.

I feel that the roots might be classical, folk, negro spiritual/blues and tribal rhythms???

This is making me wish I was a decent artist because I think the Tree analogy is quite an apt one, and I'd love to create an artistic diagram.

I think I'd have to include John Peel in the picture with a Watering Can. Manufactured bands could be a choking vine or something. And one of the biggest apples on the tree would be Dark Side Of The Moon.

Oh yeah, sorry about not noticing that this had been covered already - but if it's buried as an off-topic aside in a thread how am I supposed to know???? :D