"Alloy" rock

This is a term I came up with long ago, to describe hard rock bands that use metallic tone in the guitar sounds, but don’t play metal music per se.  Led Zeppelin is the classic example of this; they’re out on the extremes of hard rock tone, and they’re not considered a metal band.  Other bands I included in this category were Thin Lizzy, ZZ Top, and Aerosmith.

One characteristic about alloy guitarists is that they continue to use blues riffs and scales as the raw material for their solos.  The five-note blues scales are called pentatonics, and they have distinctive sound.

 Metal guitarists, on the other hand, use seven-note major and minor scales in their soloing.  They also make use of the different ‘modes’ of the these same scales.  By changing the starting note of the scale, a player can change the sound of it dramatically. Arpeggios have also been a characteristic metal staple; that is the rapid production of the tones of a chord in succession, one after another, rather than strumming them all at once. 

Certainly there’s no hard and fast line between Alloy and Metal—lots of bands live on the border.  Eddie Van Halen is a good example of this; he is definitely capable of the technical proficiency that metal guitarists display.  But since Eddie does use blues riffs, he is generally not considered a metal guitarist.  Randy Rhodes did not blues material in his soloing, so he is seen as a metal guitarist.  Yet both play a very similar style.

I also found it interesting that alloy bands tend to use one of the instrumentalists as the lead singer, while metal bands more often have a designated lead vocalist.  I would consider bands like UFO and King’s X to be alloy, and Thin Lizzy and ZZ Top also had an instrumentalist doing the vocals.  Again, there’s many exceptions.  Led Zep, AC/DC, and Aerosmith all use a lead vocalist.  And metal bands Metallica and Megadeth use an instrumentalist as lead vocalist.

This all gets very subjective, and I’m using my own experiences and listening over the years to divide this musical pie up into arbitrary slices.  There’s a certain sound that I hear in the guitars of alloy bands, a distinct signature. Some of it has to do with the amount of what's called "gain," the ratio of increase of output over input in an amplifier. The drumming style also contributes to the sound of Alloy, but it’s the guitars I focus on.



For me, Pat Travers and Ted Nugent were hard rock, but not alloy.  Same with Nazareth and Black Oak Arkansas.  Their guitar tones don’t cross over into the territory that Jimmy Page stakes out on Led Zeppelin II, for instance.

Whether this signature sound is harmful or beneficial is still a hard question to answer.  I’ve been playing my version of this guitar tone for around 30 years, and I have learned a lot about its usage and its power to affect people.  It can be very addictive to listen or to play this music.  What does it do to us, overall?  I sense some very unsavory aspects to it, which I do not want to go into here.  Yet I can’t deny that this music gave me the strength to carry on when I was growing up; without it, this world seemed very cold and dark.  There is a heroic aspect of both metal and alloy that inspired me in a way that nothing else did; songs like “Wishing Well” (Free), and “Four Sticks” (Led Zeppelin) were lights along the way for me. 

This is all very old-school ancient history.  Neither alloy or metal is represented on the Billboard hot 100 in 2010—there’s not even a token presence there.  Ozzy’s in the top 200, though, for a hot second as I write this.