Hard Rock

Hard rock shares many characteristics with another rock music genre, heavy metal. Both feature considerable distortion of the electric guitar’s timbre, a strong and pronounced drumbeat accompanied by throbbing bass lines and vocals that highlight the singer’s exertion of energy, ofen moving into higher pitch ranges. Te differences between hard rock and heavy metal are largely differences of degree. Guitar distortion in heavy metal tends to be more piercing and coarse, while hard rock ofen features a less saturated sort of distortion, a warmer overdriven sound. Heavy metal rhythms, especially in the genre’s formative stages in the 1970s and 1980s, tend to be more squarely on the beat, while hard rock rhythms leave more room for syncopations akin to those used in funk and rhythm and blues. Indeed, over time, the more blues and R&B-based elements of heavy metal purveyed by such groups as Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith have largely been reclassified as hard rock, in recognition that the terms of heaviness are continually changing.