What is Math Rock?
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
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Hey there, Steve here. In this video, I attempt to help you better understand what math rock is by looking at a number of musical terms often used to describe math rock, and by giving examples of each term.
Songs used in this video:
Slint - Don, Aman
Slint - Nosferatu Man
TTNG - Baboon
Shapes - Retreat, Attack
Shapes - You Butcher
Meet Me In St Loius - Eins Zwei Drei Hasselhoff
Tera Melos - Trash Generator
#mathrock #guitar #guitarlesson #mathrock
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really basic, but the interplay between the two guitars in Never Meant will always be my favorite example of counterpoint. Everyone knows the 0 4 2 0 pattern, but the 2nd guitar part is equally important for making the song great.
Great example though!
I see math rock as Prog without distortion, or guitar music you can play around others
A lot of math rock had distortion
I've been seeing 'angular' used to describe guitar parts since first reading reviews of Cursive's Domestica, and 20 years later this is the first place I've gotten an actual definition of the term. Bravo, and thank you!
I first heard of math rock around 2012, and ever since my first listen, it blew my mind and became my favorite genre. one of the funniest experiences I sometimes have with it is the one you described, where I've got so used to listening to the odd times and angular melodies that they sound normal to me, and I'm not sure if the bands have gone more standard or it is me who got too deep into it
I'm still trying to get into math rock
same here!
You're doing great.
You'll love it.
after i found out there's one thing called "math rock", i'm trying to get into it too.
but well, it's hard.
still trying, tho.
Tricot, atdi, slint
thanks for the slint tab, i tried it and started learning it! love slint
You're welcome! Such an awesome band
counterpoints thingy is what got me into such music. bands like rega and LITE come to mind.
Uchu Conbini - EverythingChanges use 18/16 time sign for the intro
A great lesson. Love watching UA-cam's cutest guitar content creator.
You clearly don't watch a lot of UA-cam then 😅😅 just kidding. Thanks!
@@LetsTalkAboutMathRock ^_^
Biblical Violence by Hella exemplifies almost all of these characteristics in a single song (and it’s a banger).
I love capn jazz for the counterpoints, didn’t know there was a word for that until today. Keep up the awesome vids!
Thanks! And yeah, hella!
I love the stop start/bridge part of oyasumi by tricot. Such a fun part to work out
Great example!
I enjoyed trying to guess what song you were going to use as an example for each term. only got trash generator right lol
Another quality content yey. Nice background you have there
I really recommend
The mountains♥
Tricot
Uchu conbini
The cabs
👍👍
Way too many people sleep on The Cabs
@@DatingTV true
Dude I missed your channel
Haven't been here in so long, now I have a lot of new content to watch!
It will always and forever be Emo jazz
Not all math rock is that type of emo Midwest tappy math rock some is directed more towards noise rock
There's no jazz in this, just a lot of chords and chord changes borrowed from so-called cocktail jazz arrangements, but everything seems rehearsed or memorized. Jazz has more of spontaneous, improvisational feel.
@@Crunkboy415 Yeah there is jazz influence as far as asthetic but yeah not a lot of improv in the actual recording of records. Could be worth a try though.
the reason why i'm so hyped when this video released..
i need some explanation, or some sort of simplified explanation, when most of my friends ask me "math rock? what the hell is that?"
and yes... i'm the only one who interested so much about math rock among my friends.
sad...
My favorite example of syncopation and counterpoint is probably This Ain't a Surfin' Movie by Minus The Bear. Dave and Jake just gel so well together as guitarist as Dave and Jake just do their own things to compliment each others riffs. Puddle by CHON is also a great example of this :)
Yeah, math rock is really a broad genre. Usually, to me anyway, anything classified as math rock has odd time-feel. I've come to realize that I like post-hardcore math rock, and math/emo.
And you mentioned two of my favorites in Meet Me in St. Louis and TTNG lol
Nice!
I love ttng❤️
Another band that does counterpoint well is colour, the whole anthology is great but conversations or unicorn is a good start
Yes! I feel like a lot of the UK mathy bands during that period were doing so
odd time examples? a lot of king gizzard songs go 7/8 actually. thanks for the educational vid!!
Thanks for the knowledge
Math Rock is the Jurassic Park of music. So concerned with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. Your point about syncopation VS meter at 3:30 accurately describes what's actually going on at 1:50. Realistically, Slints is all just 4/4 with two bars of straight quarter notes and then two more with just the dropped downbeats. Writing it like it's 4/5/4/3 is just a Stravinsky-ism.
Math Rock = rock influenced punk then evolved into hardcore, eventually people thought "what if we take punk and hardcore techniques back into rock"
@@deadlyspawns Something that broadly defined would either be called "post-punk" or "post-hardcore", depending on the scene and sound. ie. Bullet for my Valentine is a rock band drawing heavily from their recent hardcore/punk influences, and they define the welsh post-hardcore scene, along with similar scene bands like Funeral for a Friend. What ever "Math Rock" might say it is, it's much more specific than that.
@@SoundslikeLogic You make a good point; although post-hardcore/post-punk is taking the evolutionary step forward in expansion. Math rock is taking what punk and hardcore did and going back to rock (asking themselves - what would rock have sounded like if they used punk and hardcore techniques)
@@deadlyspawns I always thought, at least the stuff I hear, it was like alt/emo rock that tried to pull technique from prog without actually fully becoming prog, ie. committing to odd time signatures, modal interchange, etc., and the "math" was a nominal allusion to that
@@SoundslikeLogic That's also a good way to look at it, and accurate. Punkers and rockers trying to sound different spawned the alternative adjective especially with the addition of hip-hop and pop of the 80's all trying to sound different too. Experimental times called for new terms. Emo is just light punk or punk going backwards to light rock while still retaining it's newly learned techniques. Aggression got old quick like any niche "vibe" in a music style so emo was like but sometimes I'm sad and happy but I still want to be punk in music. Alt rock 's choices and ventures had a part to play in punkers wanting to experiment within their own genre too by being impressed by the alt rockers. Although it didn't influence math rock directly in the music itself. Progressive rock came before shortly after punk, although punk wasn't yet coined as punk. ie: Death (1970 Detroit), Carrie Nations - Find It. Odd time signatures goes all the way back to Ars Nova from the 13th century all the way into classical. Ars Nova - Guillaume De Machaut - Amours Me Fait Desirer, this song is peculiar because no one in existence today writes like Guillaume. Delta Blues and folk had odd time signatures and modal changes, rock in the 50's/60's all the way to the 80's.
I think that Pink Magick from Giraffes? Giraffes! has lots of excellent examples of these, but I think Counterpoint is expressed really well from Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong.
Math rock has some great stuff. “When The Summer Ends” by American football is fantastic
Love this style
glad i found this video and you’re mentioning time signatures. i started to watch a few of the others and thought maybe you were confusing emo with actual math rock. to me math rock is like crowhate ruin, hoover, sleepytime trio, slint. not so much the promise ring stuff
Thank you for the great explanation most people just explain the 5/4 and you also gave the example 7/8 which is a huge difference from other explanations because it can always keep expanding. I love math rock because no matter how different originally you make your music if it's still 4/4 its just still boring old 4/4...well for people like me anyways that need constant change or they get bored. music did this more often before the industrial revolution which i blame for the death of all music and creativity. Which is why I love math rock music.... Music is slowly coming back to life thanks to this and now we just need to this with art... our biggest down fall as a society i think is TV and social media... Besides places like youtube and soundcloud. which don't have force fed diarrea news feeds ect... anyhoodle good demonstration. Maybe one day people wont be mindless slaves. and we can come up with more regular patters. Math Rock is good start though at getting back to good music. you can thank the industrial revolution for the downfall in great music...it became all about advertising with the same lame 4/4 crap..... people singing...period.... singing! not! good math rock without words is best. maybe when humans intellectual minds evolve further we can enjoy lyrics. but we are not there yet. So i think music should not have lyrics. intellectualism is still in its early stages... and music is not! Which is why it should remain instrumental for now in my opinion.... Music is life! it is something we can all share... where intellectualism is more of a personal thing which should be left out of music. So in other words.... Instrumental Math Rock. That is a perfect start to rebirth the creativity that was destroyed with the industrial revolution. but that's just my intellectual opinion lol...
Its weird bc i can hear math rock from a mile away but will never be able to correctly describe it
Tribal rain!
A band from my place! Do hear them!
I love Steve Vai's!
For me, Save Us From the Archon have the most interesting use of odd and chopped up time signatures and their use of triplets and dotted notes. Such melodic cacophony.
Hi Steve!
Uchu Conbini - 8 Films.
The entire track is filled with mathy fun! :D
I fuckin love maff rock
when I think about math rock, I think in Chon and covet. Maybe also the fall of troy. Sometimes I like to think some Djent bands as heavy math rock lol, like Altostratus.
Some of my friends described math rock as anime music, because of some songs of tricot and totorro.
But I have one friend that says that is music for musicians, as only they can enjoy the complex structure of a song. What happens to me, actually, is: when a song doesn't make any sense I just try to count the beats as the song goes by, if I get it wrong I'm like meh, i'll get it right sometime, and that keeps me hooked lol.
The sad thing is that I feel that I can't enjoy this music among my friends, because they hate it. "too many notes" they say, or "maybe just one song, after that is pretty tiring" or "it doesn't make any sense". I feel like the only one in my town that listens to this amazing genre.
Amazing content as always.
That Shapes clip sounds very Dillinger-esque. Any particular song or album recommendations to get into them?
I have a lot of midwest emo in my math rock so I would include things like 7th and 9th chords and arpeggiation. But I think they are more indicative of emo than mathrock. Alternate tunings(open tunings) seem to be quite ubiquitous through both genres though
I should say I do love the definitions you used here. It explains why there are some mathrock bands I just never got into and others I can't stop listening to. Counterpoint and odd time signatures add an element that makes the music exciting and fresh without disturbing the flow of things while starting/stropping and angular melodies make things feel quite disjointed to me and I'm not as much a fan of. Makes the fact that I love ttng and piglet but never really got into tera melos and hella make sense to me now so thanks for that.
5:50 when you talk about the irregular stuff. I always think about Dilute - queer dork song
is shapes not on spotify?
E M O J A Z Z
Dr. Ian Williams. With or without moustache
Math Rock = rock influenced punk then evolved into hardcore, eventually people thought "what if we take punk and hardcore techniques back into rock"
What would be this guys fav guitar? i cant tell...
Maybe this is implicated in the name and is too obvious to point out, but instrumentally math rock seems to stick pretty close to a traditional set-up of guitars, drum, bass. I'm not sure how common it is for math rock bands to have piano as the primary or secondary melodic instrument, or include some big band or classical accompaniment (excluding saxophone which can and will show up in everything from pop to jazz to post-punk) but I feel at that point you're more liable to be called prog or avant-garde. Then again, TTNG re-did Animals acoustically with some orchestral parts and I didn't think it sound like avant-garde folk or something...it still sounded like math rock tbh. Wonder why it's not as common, but I think it shows that there's something stylistically there.
But just continuining, for a mathy record with some varied instrumentation, I'd recommend Rock Island by Palm, who I imagine some here are familiar with. It has quite a bit of steel drum via midi-pickups on it. Palm don't play with dissonance as much as some as some other math rock outfits, but rhythmically there's lots of fun stuff.
Anyway, good and thoughtful video as always. Defining genres is hard.
Counterpoint is a lot of at the drive in older not too sure if they kept that later prolly tho knowing them
Transatlantic foe I think
Hi there! I'm trying to find a math rock band I watched long time ago in one of your videos... It was a duet from Mexico or Brazil, talented guitarrist typping styling and girl drummer. Could you help me please? Cheers!!!
Gotta add more TMP!!! hahahaha!!!
I think a lot of people are misusing the term math rock, while a lot of today's "math rock" has the math part, most of it is missing the rock part.
Math rock is a very American term, here in the UK we tend to use "Gypsy jazz-punk"
Math Rock = rock influenced punk then evolved into hardcore, eventually people thought "what if we take punk and hardcore techniques back into rock"
a good and accurate definition for mathrock would simply be "new fusion" or "neo fusion"
even mario calls his style of playing as fusion, rather than mathrock
the explanation for this comes from the creator of fusion himself, miles davis
he considered fusion, a merge of jazz with "what is new on modern music", and mathrock is basically a merge of jazz and punk/emo
polyphia is basically a mix of jazz with trap and modern metal, basically fusion
Most bands 80% are fusion: Metallica - metal / rock / punk. At The Drive-In - hardcore punk / progressive rock / spanish folk. etc.
They blend their stylistic influences this way to sound separate from the herd (to create something new and not plagiarize a sound, vibe or style - to offer something different for people since fads kill 75% of art from surviving - to feel great about contributing something new and that hopefully as a group or society music progresses so they can in turn continue to enjoy new music)
Not critiquing - just adding.
REAL MATH ROCK
this town needs guns
Yes, they will always have a place in my heart 🤗❣
They're TTNG now
Mathrock 4 Life
It is extremely sad and disappointing that Sleeping People rarely get mentioned in videos like this when they are BY FAR the best band in the genre after Don Caballero.
Math rock is a weird cousin of post rock (also emo jazz)
Thats a good analogy, I love both 😉👍
Dont a lot of rock bands do counterpoint tho? I dont think its only just math rock
Math Rock = rock influenced punk then evolved into hardcore, eventually people thought "what if we take punk and hardcore techniques back into rock"
I clicked for the quarry boys
😅
King gizzard
The most common term i've heard math rock being described as is "shit".
Q and not U
math rock? i think thats just emo jazz
It's rock. But Math
math rock = surf rock for hipsters
Math rock sucks
Math rock was a mistake
Lol