Metal Music Blog

Have you been looking for guitar tabs of your favorite bands? I encourage you to check out Guitar World’s new service in which they provide lots of guitar tabs for anyone interested.

Let’s see what Guitar World Tabs says about itself: “Guitar World Tabs is the new online home for 100% accurate and professionally engraved guitar and bass tablature from Guitar World magazine. There are also tons of user tabs and user performance videos to choose from, and we encourage you to register and contribute your own. New songs are being added every day, so be sure to check back for your favorites, and let us know what else you’d like to see on the site“. Sounds like an excellent service. Let’s check it out!

First of all, Guitar World Tabs seems to be a community, not just a static website. This is great, because in a community you can get much more content because many users provide their own tabs. Additionally you can discuss and exchange information in a community, which is not possible with old-school static websites.

Front page of Guitar World Tabs seems pretty good. It’s not the most simple and fastest to learn, but it’s not messy either. Featured, top-rated, most viewed and newest guitar tabs are linked on the front page and can be found easily. You can also see interesting YouTube videos on the front page. Just guess what is the top-rated video right now? Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer.. I know. It could rather be something like Pantera’s Cowboys From Hell.

What I find really nice is that users are also linked by top-rated, most-discussed and most-active. You can see this in the right side of the front page. Additionally the right sidebar includes lessons and videos from Guitar World.

Awesome! I’m starting to like this website! Let’s try to find some tabs to play..

I searched for van halen guitar tabs and I got what I wanted. The first one I see is “You Really Got Me”. No thanks, I don’t want to play it. I rather play the classic “I’ll Wait”.

Looking good. Let me try another search. I have been Judas Priest fan since I was 12 years old. I would like to play their classic Painkiller, so I search for Judas Priest guitar tabs. I got pretty many tabs, but by scrolling down the page I can find Painkiller.

Man, Guitar World Tabs is a great service for guitar players. What say you? I honestly find it good and useful.

If you compare two cultures, Japanese and Finnish, you won’t find many similarities. May be the only common this is that both Japanese and Finns are workaholics. When it comes to music, I can’t see much similarity. So, why on Earth Finnish metal and even folk music bands are pretty popular in Japan? Some Finnish bands sell more in Japan than in Finland, and some Kantele (traditional Finnish instrument) are not known in Finland but sell pretty much in Japan.

Japan is the world’s second biggest single music market, straight after United States. It is bigger than the rest of the Asia and as big as UK and France together. What is the secret behind the success of Finnish music in Japan? Pale face and blue eyes? Fiercer look and Viking style? Although some Finnish bands have made it, it is not easy to enter the Japanese music market.

Bands like Stratovarius and Hanoi Rocks have been popular in Japan for some years, but new bands like Lovex and Negative are joining the group of Finnish bands performing in Japan. Kantele-artist Eva Alkula is going to have four gigs in Japan this year. So far 100 Finnish artists of different music genres have released their music in Japan. Although those Finnish bands have sold tens of thousands of albums in Japan, most of the ordinary Japanese citizens are not familiar with these bands. But what really is interesting is that a metal music expert of a Japanese record company asks “which one is more popular in Europe - Sonata Arctica or Iron Maiden“? (Source - Soundi Magazine 5/208). This is no wonder because Sonata Artica is more popular in Japan than Robbie Williams for example. Sonata Arctica has sold 70.000 records in Japan so far.

So what makes Finnish music popular in distant Japan? It is melodic music and fashion related things. Melodies of Finnish metal and rock bands sound good in the ears of Japanese people. Additionally the outfit of bands like Lovex and Hanoi Rocks seem pretty cool in the eyes of Japanese people. Japanese also enjoy music sang high, which is one of the reasons why Sonata Arctica sells well in Japan. For example HIM is not popular in Japan because Ville Valo sings low.

Other reasons for the success in Japan are related to making business with Japanese companies of music industry. Personal relationships matter very much and bands need to get high visibility in Japanese media so that they reach their target audience. Bands must be patient and tenacious. It takes time to break through in Japan.

If you are a serious metalhead, you would probably say Lovex sucks. Well, you’re not the only one thinking like that in metal scene, but guess what? Lovex has very high potential to break through in Japan and in the rest of the world. Diablo and Amon Amarth sound better for headbangers but they will never break through because the big masses don’t listen to such heavy music.

Image source.

Yesterday I just came across with a metal cover of Ricky Martin’s Livin La Vida Loca. It was pretty good, so I decided to search few more. Here are five good metal covers I found in YouTube. For sure there are a lot more, but I didn’t spend more than half an hour. If you know some good covers, please leave links to comments.

Metal Cover #1 Ricky Martin - Livin La Vida Loca by 10 Masked Men
Embedding is not allowed, so please watch the video in YouTube. This is a pretty nice cover, I really like it.

Metal Cover #2 Madonna - La Isla Bonita by Twilight Guardians

These guys are from my country, Finland. Actually I discovered them already last year and I have written about them once, but here they are once again. Enjoy!

Metal Cover #3 Black - Wonderful Life by Nevergreen

Do you remember Black’s Wonderful Life from 1980’s? Well, at least I remember. Here it is played with doom metal tune. Man, I like this one a lot!

Metal Cover #4 Britney Spears - Oops I Think I Did It Again by Children of Bodom

For sure C.O.B.’s cover of Britney Spears is my favorite. Damn it’s just good!

Metal Cover #5 Batman Theme by Corey1987

Let me guess that you haven’t heard this one yet? It’s pretty cool. Batman theme played very well. Listen to it. What say you?

This post was written by Headbanger and its original location is in Metal-Music-Videos.Com blog. For more great metal music articles, please visit Metal-Music-Videos.Com!

I’ve got interesting results from our April poll in which we asked our readers which music makes you feel sick. We had various choices, such as rap, alternative, country, jazz and even rock and metal.

We received 135 votes in total which is small but decent sample. It is interesting to see the results. In fact, the results are a little bit funny. I understand that most of the votes (21%) were given to rap, which means most of our readers cannot stand rap music. Anyhow, I don’t quite understand that 14% of our readers say metal music makes them feel sick. Dude, this is a metal music blog. We talk about metal music here. Hey, who are reading this blog? ?

Next 14% of the votes were given to country music and 11% to pop music. I think it is pretty common that metalheads cannot stand country and pop music, right? Next 10% of the votes were given to techno/electrical/dance, and what’s surprising, 7% of the votes were given to rock music. Again, who are reading this blog?

Let’s continue. 6% of the votes were given to jazz, 5% to classical, 4% to opera and evergreen and 3% to alternative. According to this poll, most of the readers don’t really like rap, metal and country music. On the other hand most readers do like alternative, evergreen and opera. Hey, was there something wrong with the question?

Wow! This was definitely the most interesting poll so far. I am really surprised with the results. All the people who have written comments in this blog seem to be metalheads, but this poll indicates something else. There are more daily readers than the number of the votes in total, so we can say this poll is not good enough sample in order to generalize the results. I believe most of the readers are metalheads, but it looks like not so many people are interested in providing answers to this kind of polls. Anyhow, thank you for joining this poll! Check out also our March poll results. In March 2008 we asked people if they like metalcore.

This post was written by Headbanger and its original location is in Metal-Music-Videos.Com blog. For more great metal music articles, please visit Metal-Music-Videos.Com!