I'm thinking of expanding my skills with harp playing to Heavy Metal music. It is quite natural move as I was a total "metal head" in my younger years. I love playing the blues, but to be honest I sometimes get bored. In my hometown there are lots of metal bands. I was actually asked to join one of them - or at least try out if we could make harp work there and differentiate the band in that way from the rest.
So my question is whether you know any Heavy Metal harpists that have a band? It would be good to know what kind of gear they use etc. So that I wouldn't have to invent the wheel again here..
I think that musically it is quite easy to play that kind of music as it is mostly the pentatonic scale and three chords. The sound is the trickier part.. :)
I seem to recall seeing a video once of a metal guy playing harp, but I have no idea who it was. Of course Hakan posts some pretty heavy stuff in some of his vids, but of course that's not in a band setting. Jason gets some electric lead guitar sounds coming out of his harp sometimes. Buddha did a pretty good Purple Haze. I'd start by going to YouTube and clicking on their videos and seeing what videos come up in the column to the right.
I'm blanking, but a couple weeks ago someone famous had a video where they were playing in a music store and they sounded a lot like an electric guitar. It's right on the tip of my tongue...
I also have a vague recollection of a video of some woman in Spain tearing it up, and an even more vague recollection that Walter Torre mentioned he'd met her, but I could be remembering wrong.
Of course Metal is a pretty broad category. I grew up in the hair metal age and slid into grunge rock. There is a lot of room from speed metal to classic metal to cello metal. Look it up. According to Wikipedia it's a real thing. Then of course you have kazoo metal:
Yeah Nate! That was Darell Mansfield at NAMM 2012. Pretty cool but more in a jimmy hendrixy way than heavy metal. Håkan Ehn plays some cool stuff too, undoubtedly. I would like to hear him (or someone else) take on some of Muse's(not so heavy)metal.
EDIT: Darell actually plays all along the watchtower... So it's more than hendrixy it's Hendrix. ---------- Pistolkatt - Pistolkatts youtube
Last Edited by on Apr 20, 2012 1:38 PM
@Nacoran The music is melodic heavy metal. I'm looking for both accompaniment & soloing sounds. The comping would be something like what Richard Hunter had in his example, solos would be perhaps something like screaming guitars..
Apskarp, I think harp is pretty well suited for melodic metal. In the hard rock vein I've been trying to rip off some of Slash's riffs. I was messing around with some some harder rock than usual today and really enjoying it. It wasn't quite metal but it certainly wasn't blues. :)
I bought a used RP355 which should arrive tomorrow or on wednesday. I'm planning to buy Richard Hunter's patch set for it too. I have had few effects pedals but the truth is that it would really take time to find the right settings for the sounds and thus it is a LOT easier to buy some readily made set.
I hope I'll find good sounds for heavy metal too, at least the one example on Hunter's page seems good for rhythm playing. If anybody has good settings for the RP355 those would be highly appreciated...
We had our first rehearsal. It was good, but I had one problem. It was nearly impossible to avoid feedback. I played the Digitech through mixer and PA system and I had to control the feedback with volume knob all the time. That made the playing quite difficult.
Any tips for how to avoid that? The room was quite small and had two PA speakers. I used Ultimate 545 mic.
I made some search on Google and onteh forum. I found already plenty of advices how to setup the RP355 and mixers. Generally speaking - put the RP volume low and try to put the AMP gain also lower if that doesn't help. Try different mics. E.g. Fireball V has less feedback than my 545...
I'll try to fix the problem with those advices and then if it doesn't help I might to start looking into the anti-feedback devices.
@ Frosty, thanks i almost forgot about nicky shane. after i put myself through the mental torture of the sample tracks, iv concluded he has improved his playing. :)
Get Richard's patches. I had spent hours on the POD HD500 and even gigged with it before playing it with a full band. Feedback city.
I then had to start over, from scratch, with everything...another 4-6 hours. Oddly enough, I know have a full band scene that is louder through my monitor than my HG50 ever was.
The trick on that unit is the amp settings AND the eq. If I use a transparent noise gate and the mic pre, which has eq options, I can pretty much do anything without feedback. However, when I try to control it via just the amp settings, it is a PIA.
Richard has done all the hard work for you, and it is cheap to purchase.
A final note, even in heavy metal, you will want a cleaner sound than you think. That is the only way it will cut through the mix. When you listen to studio tracks, they are often double tracked and then adjusted in post production to sit with the other instruments well.
Most of his stuff is solo and/or overdubbed. It is totally possible that he has not ran these patches at metal type volumes.
You may find that the easiest solution is adding an eq pedal or some other feedback killing device to your board.
Either that, or using your own monitor/amp for the unit. What I do is lineout from a monitor to FOH. That way, they can eq it or add gain, etc, while I have full control over the monitor. ---------- Mike VHT Special 6 Mods Quicksilver Custom Harmonicas - When it needs to come from the soul...
