My Melodic Grind Experiment

I have a lot of musical crap floating around in my head that wouldn’t really work for the band, but I still end up putting together for my own gratification.  I thought this would be a good place to share this stuff and talk about my writing process outside of the band.  I’m going to lump all this stuff into a category I’ll call ‘worthless effluvia’.  Here goes…

I’m sure most of you are aware that grindcore isn’t known for having a strong melodic component, so I find myself wondering what it would sound like if it did.  This lead to the idea of playing different scales at the same time, specifically the natural minor scale for the melodic component, and the diminished scale for the harmonic/rhythmic component (with both still in the same key).  I did this by creating a ‘verse’ that is a typical punk-inflected grind riff, and then introducing the diminished and melodic riffs separately for the ‘chorus’, starting first with the diminished riff, then adding the melodic riff on top of it (along with a section of me ‘singing’.  Sorry about that…).  Finally, I end the song with the melodic riff played over a more traditional harmony.

It turns out this worked really well.  This may be obvious for some of you, but a someone who minored in music at college, it’s easy to get stuck in the idea that mixing two different scales at the same time is a bad idea, and it was really liberating to combine the two scales and have it work nicely.  A diminished and natural minor scale together is, it turns out, really fucking metal.

As for the song itself?  Well, it ended up sounding like a crappy version of Anaal Nathrakh, which isn’t too much of a failure given how much that band rules.  It’s funny how it took this experiment to remind of a band that combines melody and grind so well.

If you’re curious, the song name comes from Japanese folklore.