ABSTRACT
The most important music of our time is recorded music. Capturing and presenting intelligibility whilst simultaneously retaining metal music’s heaviness is a distinct and fundamental production challenge facing the contemporary metal producer. The radical harmonic distortion of contemporary metal’s rhythm guitar timbres presents a paradox. This chapter analyzes the paradox, examining the link among harmonic distortion, perception, and heaviness; the signal modification provided by distortion; and the challenges that this modification presents to definition and intelligibility. The ecological approach emphasizes the relationship between organisms and their environment. Distortion has a considerable, and highly significant, impact on the frequency content of electric guitars. Frequency density relates to how the energy of a guitar signal is distributed across the frequency range—in this instance being modified so that it is highly concentrated at and around the fundamental.
