# The Faceless, Decrepit Birth, etc. style writing...



## Asterix (Jul 30, 2011)

I have always been a giant fan of The Faceless, and Decrepit Birth, but recently decided that I want to start aiming my music towards writing more like them. I've been a fan of mainly Polarity, Diminishing Between Worlds, Planetary Duality, and especially their new song "The Eidolon of Reality," but all of their other works are also inspirational. If you could help me out by showing me some scales and chords that are used in this style of writing that would be awesome. I have come across the Harmonic Minor, Phrygian Dominant, and Half-Whole Diminished, but was wondering if there are anymore.
Thanks


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## Stealthdjentstic (Jul 30, 2011)

Phrygian and Harmonic Minor were the two I was going to suggest you base your riffing off of. Speed has a lot to do with death metal like theirs, it can make some of the most boring bluesiest sounding riffs sound like fetus's being eaten by Randy.


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## Stealth7 (Jul 31, 2011)

The Add 9 chord gets a lot usage in both bands music.

Looks like this.

G|-11--
D|-9---
A|-7---
E|-----

That's all I can really add!


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## Asterix (Aug 1, 2011)

Thanks for the help guys!


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## Infamous Impact (Aug 1, 2011)

Add some chromaticism and you're set!


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## PollutedSanctum (Aug 24, 2011)

If you try to use only certain scales, the riffing will suffer. Just write a riff that you'd imagine they'd write. Visualize a scene that you visualize when listen to them, write some notes. Do they fit your vision? If not. Tweak until you get something that does. You need to find something that resonates with you. Playing around with the scales can't hurt. In fact it helps to know what you're working with, but in my opinion, music theory is an after thought. Get good at writing by ear, THEN worry about theory, and it will work much better than the other way around. as long as you know what all your triads and seventh chords sound like, and you can suspend them and stuff, and you know your scales front and back, it will be injected into your playing. But learn to crawl before you try to run. Music theory doesn't kill your creativity. It exposes you to new ideas and thus heightens it. ONLY when you try to WRITE using it does it kill your creativity. Like an olympic athlete doesn't think about form when he writes, he's just seen it done and practiced his sport so much that it's second nature. Your ear will write for you.


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## brootalboo (Aug 24, 2011)

PollutedSanctum said:


> If you try to use only certain scales, the riffing will suffer. Just write a riff that you'd imagine they'd write. Visualize a scene that you visualize when listen to them, write some notes. Do they fit your vision? If not. Tweak until you get something that does. You need to find something that resonates with you. Playing around with the scales can't hurt. In fact it helps to know what you're working with, but in my opinion, music theory is an after thought. Get good at writing by ear, THEN worry about theory, and it will work much better than the other way around. as long as you know what all your triads and seventh chords sound like, and you can suspend them and stuff, and you know your scales front and back, it will be injected into your playing. But learn to crawl before you try to run. Music theory doesn't kill your creativity. It exposes you to new ideas and thus heightens it. ONLY when you try to WRITE using it does it kill your creativity. Like an olympic athlete doesn't think about form when he writes, he's just seen it done and practiced his sport so much that it's second nature. Your ear will write for you.



Nice response. I say +1 on writing by ear. The only band I can pretty much write exactly like is Trivium, because I know every one of their songs. I know that they are pretty much all written in d minor (except for one of their albums) so I could probably sit down with a guitar and improvise like them for an eternity. What I would recommend is learning a lot of their songs, and learning which scales they use, and naturally you will develop a style like theirs because you know how they do things. Hope that helps


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