Hard rock
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Louder volume, thicker riffs, vocals pushed to the edge. Heavy metal splits off from it, but hard rock stays closer to the blues and to the chorus.
How it sounds
- Riffs built on power chords, with palm muting and constant distortion.
- Vocals pushed into the high register, often right at the edge of a rasp.
- A heavy rhythm section that still grooves — the bass stays melodic rather than doubling the guitar.
Hear what that means
- The room
The drums are a stone hall and a distant microphone rather than a kit and a close one. Bonham's sound is a recording technique as much as a way of hitting things.
Open on YouTube - Swing, which metal removes
Play this dead straight and it stops working. The shuffle in the right hand is exactly what traditional metal took out, and it is the clearest one-bar test between the two branches.
Open on YouTube - The riff as the song from 20:02
Four notes in parallel fourths, and the entire song built on them. This is the riff becoming the subject rather than an accompaniment to a solo.
Open on YouTube at 20:02
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 100-140 bpm
- Song length
- 4-7 min
- Tuning
- E standard, dropped D, or open tunings borrowed from the blues — and a great deal of the genre's identity is in the guitar being slightly out of tune with itself and left that way.
- Production
- Big rooms and few overdubs. The defining records were made by putting a very loud band in a stone hall or a stairwell and moving the microphones back, which is why the drums sound the way they do.
- Written about
- Sex, The road, Mythology, borrowed loosely, Nothing in particular, at volume
What each part is doing
- Guitar The riff as the song's subject — written, repeated, and structurally load-bearing in a way blues rock's figures were not. Open tunings and a slide are common, and the phrasing is still blues even where the form is not.
- Bass Locked to the kick and playing the riff, which is the arrangement decision that makes a hard rock band sound like one instrument.
- Drums Hit extremely hard, recorded in a big room from a distance, and playing behind the beat. Bonham's sound is a room and a technique, not a kit.
- Vocals A high, blues-derived wail, pushed to the edge of the register. This is the last stop before metal singing becomes a separate discipline.
What it isn't
That it is the same thing as heavy metal. They separate on swing. Hard rock keeps the shuffle and the blues phrasing it inherited — Led Zeppelin and AC/DC both swing hard — while metal deliberately straightens the rhythm out, which is what makes it feel mechanical and relentless rather than loose and physical. Play a Zeppelin riff dead straight and it stops being Zeppelin; that is the whole difference, and it is audible in one bar.
Told apart from
- Blues rock Blues rock solos over a form; hard rock writes a riff and builds a song on it. The moment the riff stops being a figure around a twelve-bar, you have crossed over.
- Traditional heavy metal Traditional metal removes the swing and the blues, doubles the guitars and raises the vocal. Hard rock still swings, which is the easiest tell there is.
- Glam rock Glam rock is the same era's other direction: hard rock's volume with pop songwriting and a theatrical persona, and far less interest in the riff.
- Stoner rock Stoner rock is hard rock's riff vocabulary slowed, down-tuned and made fuzzier, arriving twenty years later by way of doom.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Between 1968 and 1970 blues rock thickened: Led Zeppelin added dynamics and folk, Deep Purple added organ and classical technique, and Black Sabbath went in the direction that became metal. Hard rock is the branch that kept the groove and the chorus. AC/DC and Guns N' Roses showed the formula does not age if you mean it.
Descended from
Branches into
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Celtic metal 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Oriental metal 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Progressive metal 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.