Nine Inch Nails and Theory

[dragonsofeden]

Been listening to "The Downward Spiral" for the millionth time, this has to be my all time favorite album.

anyway, i have only begun to analyze the music theory behind this album, because i have not had much music theory education until this past year. it seems to me like a lot of the songs are fairly common chord progressions, ex. "Reptile" is D, F, G. it seems to me what sets them apart though is they seem to use the flatted 5th as a chord tone a lot (a diminished chord?) a good example of this is "Hurt" also D,F,G and in the opening chord you hear a flatted 5th played in the arpeggio.

in the song Closer the bassline is playing a riff in C blues during the verse and during the verse and during the chorus is playing a riff in what seems to be F blues.

can any of you music theory geniuses give me any further insight into the unique sound of NIN?

rock on
john

[Poparad]

Just treat it the way you already are: as a basic chord progression, with those extra 'color' notes added in. The b5 has a very distinctive sound to it, and most of the time because it's not in the key of the progression. However, usually when it's used, it resolves by a half step one or way or the other to a note that is in the key. Chormaticism is a hard thing to figure out when you're just beginning to learn theory, but here's the general way to appraoch it: start with what is in the key, and treat the chromaticism as extra 'inbetween' notes that are used for color or to tie other notes together.

[faintron]

Been listening to "The Downward Spiral" for the millionth time, this has to be my all time favorite album.

anyway, i have only begun to analyze the music theory behind this album, because i have not had much music theory education until this past year. it seems to me like a lot of the songs are fairly common chord progressions, ex. "Reptile" is D, F, G. it seems to me what sets them apart though is they seem to use the flatted 5th as a chord tone a lot (a diminished chord?) a good example of this is "Hurt" also D,F,G and in the opening chord you hear a flatted 5th played in the arpeggio.

in the song Closer the bassline is playing a riff in C blues during the verse and during the verse and during the chorus is playing a riff in what seems to be F blues.

can any of you music theory geniuses give me any further insight into the unique sound of NIN?

rock on
johnAye, Trent Reznor is phenomenal; a lot of what gives NIN a unique sound is simply sound design...creating entirely new synth patches/effects using a combination of samples, filters for live instruments, digital tampering and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

The following are some clippings from various interviews that may be helpful:

"Though he's a trained classical pianist, he hasn't looked at a piece of sheet music in [many] years. He didn't want traditional music theory and technique to interfere with Nine Inch Nails' raw [sound]"

Trent: [talking about With Teeth] "This time around I wanted to...keep myself from going off on sound design or on some concept like that, which I find myself wanting to do, when I should sometimes be concentrating on other things that I feel less confident about, like lyrics and the actual songwriting part of it. So this time I had a deadline every ten days, when I wanted to finish each song. I sat down with Battery, sometimes also Elektrik Piano, and recorded vocals into the computer. I tried to keep it just drums, piano, and vocals. After four to five months I wound up with about 25 songs that I thought were really good, but that felt like demos and weren’t arranged.

When I had those demos together, we went through them and picked out the best ones that worked as an album. Then I went to New Orleans studio to formally record them. I wanted it to make it sound performance-based. I was using live drums, most of the tracks have live drums on them. A lot of the sounds were miked. Even if it was a synth line, it might go through a speaker cabinet to give it the impression of it being played. We used guitar and bass, and we would go from the instruments right into the DI box and then into Reaktor, where we had made a couple of patches that were like an elaborate guitar switchboard all made up of filters and various types of different distortions. Very few things were chopped up in Pro Tools. A lot of it was entire verses or phrases."

"What I used to do, is listen to the factory patches for a minute, then erase them and check out the possibilities, like creating some random things. Then you could see how you could edit that randomness into something that might be more manageable and stumbling into what the instrument could do that way. Rarely would I use a factory patch. But these days there’s so many things out that have so much depth, most of which [Native Instruments] is responsible for, that I just don’t have the time to keep up to the level that I remember being at back a hundred years ago."

Also, if you have a Mac and Garage Band software, you can pull several NIN songs off of the official Nail's website and see exactly how the various tracks are layered on songs like "Survivalism". Very enlightening...there are something like six different drum tracks, four bass, various guitar, other synth effects, multiple vocal overdubbing...it's extremely complex...but logical enough to notice the formulas being used.