Guitars (and rock instruments) in Electronic Music C/D

Why do I find this so annoying? I like rock music, I like dance music. But all too often when a producer starts trying to inject their sound with guitars it just turns into a crashing mess. Even as a teen back in the nineties I remember wondering why so many bands were so bad at making the crossover. You had acts like Pitchshifter, Fear Factory and Apollo 440 who took rock/metal and tried to apply it to hard dance beats, often retaining none of the good elements of either style. The Prodigy's 'Fat Of The Land' was heinous for this reason too. But it's not just hard rock where this annoys me. I think my aversion to Boards Of Canada's 'Campfire Headphase' is down to the wack-arsed strummy acoustic guitars they insisted on strewing all over that album's otherwise lush production.

Are there many examples of electronic music and guitars (or rock production) working really well together? Or is it always a matter of watering down one to compensate for the other?

Underworld
Lionrock
Prodigy on jilted

Pitchshifter were terrific til they tried it so a total dud for them

section 25

I think distorted electric guitars carry too much weight from their strong connotation with rock music; they're always gonna feel out of place of an electronic album, as would a bagpipe or a hurdy-gurdy. (This isn't an absolute rule, obviously: there are some decent electronic tunes with guitars, or bagpipes, or hurdy-gurdy, but they are rare.) Some funkier pedal sounds, like wah-wah or scratch guitar, may work on house tunes because of house's strong roots in disco. And acoustic guitar may fit some hippier chill-out/ambient albums, as long as the playing isn't intricate enough that you start paying attention to the guitarist's performance, since electronic music isn't about performance.

"out of place on an electronic album"

Dear Dog Latin: meet New Order

To Rococo Rot
Harmonia

I think one of the reasons I never truly embraced New Order is because I have a problem with their guitar sound and the way it works with the electronic parts. Plus I think stuff like New Order, which could come under a vague banner of '80s/'90s pop is less to do with this topic because these are more rock/pop bands with keyboards rather than a blatant attempt to fuse dance-electronica with rock-pop.

but its ILM, its mandatory to talk about New Order

This thread was inspired by some Red Snapper-related chat on the 90s dance thread. And PS I don't like Red Snapper.

Devo have always done it correctly.

I like the guitar parts on Hot Chip records.

Also "Today" by Isolee

Going back a bit, OMD opened their third album "Architecture and Morality" with a song with a big jangling guitar running through it. It was the first guitar on an OMD record (if you ignore the bass), and Andy McClusky said he wanted to fuck with people's perceptions of OMD being synth pop by leading the album with a guitar-based song.

(Of course the reverse of this is "A rush and a push" leading off "Strangeways here we come", a song with no guitar from the jangly guitar cliche Smiths)

A lot of the best examples here are pre-1990s bands, and I'd be inclined to agree. The post-punk/new-pop era is full of examples of acts that fused electronic and rock sounds. But maybe the DIY aesthetic of a lot of these acts stopped it feeling so trite? Like, Devo have always had a ramshackle tacked-together sound so any incongruousness is forgiven or indeed embraced.

Ignoring the bass guitar on OMD records is kinda missing the point entirely, I think.

X-Post: I actually think what made Devo more than an art school project was just how rhythmically precise they were from the very beginning -- Alan Meyers quit when they started to bring the drum machines forward, and they didn't get tighter. On the contrary.

Mid- to late-70s Tangerine Dream fused guitars and electronics rather nicely.

They managed to make their guitars sound kind of similar to synths. Not in the sound effects they used, but in the way they were played.

Someone played me a new album by John Frusciante the other day in which he is trying to apply guitar music to the same template as acid house. A lot of it is clearly dreck, but there is a section that sounds like a 303 being played that's actually a guitar which is admirable but still kind of shite.

xpost

is it worse than 'rock guitar' being used on hip hop records?

Really like the slightly out-of-place bass guitar in Annie's "Heartbeat".

is it worse than 'rock guitar' being used on hip hop records?

― Blue Collar Retail Assistant (Dwight Yorke), Thursday, 30 August 2012 15:14 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't (or didn't) dislike guitar on hip-hop records for some reason. I guess the sample-delic use of rock loops (loops from other styles) has always existed, so something like Walk This Way is almost entirely based around Aerosmith. Even with nu-metal, it wasn't so much the use of rock instrumentation that grated. more the attitude and lyrics.

Compare this to say, Pretty Hate Machine - I always felt with that album either "Why didn't they just replace that drum machine with real drums?" or "Why don't they use a synth instead of that guitar?" - it just felt like the urgency of both the electronic work and the rock instrumentation cancelled each other out.

sorry, that was a badly-written post. I'm sure you can work out my drift.

Going back a bit, OMD opened their third album "Architecture and Morality" with a song with a big jangling guitar running through it. It was the first guitar on an OMD record (if you ignore the bass), and Andy McClusky said he wanted to fuck with people's perceptions of OMD being synth pop by leading the album with a guitar-based song.

Didn't Depeche Mode ultimately relent similarly c. "Masses" and certainly by "Violator?" They needed to expand their vocab beyond just synths.

does Le Tigre or The Beta Band count?

the Amorphous Androgynous does.

The thing is that distorted electric guitars guitars have this harsh, aggressive sound, and most electronic music doesn't want to sound harsh and aggressive. Thise sort of guitars are good for aggressive juvenile rock music, maybe some aggressive hip hop too, but not for much else.

They're mostly just used in electronic music when the people who use them were a rock act to begin with (like Le Tigre), or when a dance act wants to them signify "we're hard and rocking now!" (like The Prodigy), but rarely are they used in accordance with the strengths and formal idiosyncracies of electronic music itself.

Even with harsh/aggressive electronic music, I tend to find guitars grating. And Tuomas, there's plenty of that kind of thing in electronic music. I really don't like pleasantly strummed acoustic guitar on tracks either though. Suddenly seems to turn everything into a car advert, or one of those cheezy chill-out compilations from the mid-late 90s.

Exception to my rule: Ministry's Psalm 69, mostly because the guitars were processed and chopped in an interesting way that fit the tracks. Also - Come To Daddy, although I'm not sure those are guitars and not distorted synths.

maybe BECK's "Loser"

that's more a hip-hop song with heavy grunge leanings though... i know i'm nitpicking, but it feels different from "electronic music"

I mean, dance music has its own signifiers of hardness and roughness, like the Belgian Hoover, so why do dance acts want to borrow the signifiers from elsewhere? Because they want to tell the rock kids, "Hey, we're in you're gang now, we're not girly/gay/geeky anymore, don't be afraid of us!".

Maybe you need to develop a musical ~vocabulary~ of the guitar.

xpost but genre cross-fertilisation can work very well across other styles, why would this be a bad thing?

guitars can sound good with electronic music ... doesn't always have to be the harsh, distorted kind. As long as the guitar works with the song, and not just thrown in there or done poorly, how’s it different from any other instrument? Prob just more challenging to make the sounds work together so not many pull it off well when they try.

mellow hip hop songs with jazz guitar, electro disco with groovy funk guitar, acid rave dance shit with psychedelic guitar. don't see the big deal here.

Anyone ever get the feeling Tuomas hates rockmusic/guitar?

What about the ridiculous guitar sounds of "Discovery?" Are they a pro or con?

hmmm... i like those a lot and the little keytar solo licks on Digital Love are one of my favourite things about it. i think it's because these somehow work in a more contextual way than merely "we need to make our sound more rocky, let's smear a bunch of shredding all over it". The guitars don't sound out of place because really Discovery is a maximalist disco-prog epic of ELO-esque proportions.

I think a new form of music usually tends to shed the dominant instrument of the previous popular form. So sax and trumpet were the stars of jazz and played a prominent role in some of the early transitional rock but gradually faded out of favor in most rock music as guitar took the leading role. Then some early popular electronic music was often a rock rhythm section with synthesizers on top. But as completely electronic music took hold, the guitar lost its role and started to feel like an anachronism in that context.

The flip side of that is that musical forms that are on their decline adopt the dominant instrument of the new popular forms. So there's a transition period where electric guitar started to take a more prominent role in jazz while rock dominated, and rock music started to incorporate synthesizers as electronic music became popular.

i agree that there's something intrinsically terrible in melding rock guitars with synths (as in 'the final countdown')
but there's also something intrinsically terrible about taco bell tacos, but you cannot argue that there exists
a theoretically better version of 'the final countdown' that doesn't meld rock guitars and synths just as you cannot make
a highbrow version of a taco bell taco without destroying its fundamental taco bell taco-ness.

Ha, when I first saw this thread title, I thought of Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Fripp/Eno, Hillage, Gottsching, Marco Oppedisano. I gather you're asking specifically about guitars in electronic dance music? What about "Little Fluffy Clouds"?

here's some electronic music with guitar that I think works quite well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r32LcBqiv7I

Anyway, I've got no beef with this. Rock bands have been working heavily with electronics since the 60s, even (especially?) the biggest classic rock bands. Guitars were a part of disco from the beginning. Even Cybotron's Clear has guitars all over it. I wonder if people are making distinctions that were never really there in the first place. Nine Inch Nails had some great moments imo. Also, I'm surprised that I'm the first person to mention Radiohead.

guitars are just another thing to sample/cleanse fold & manipulate

loads of stuff in the french touch realm have guitars all over them and i've never complained.

The Cars fused power pop with synth pop very successfuly.

beautiful shiny clean electric guitar is the answer - telefon tel aviv, tortoise, four tet, etc etc etc