Is there a guide to musical styles available somewhere, things like what makes a song a rock song or a country song. I realize a lot of times the difference might be the choice of instruments or the way the song is sung, but a good list of the standards like beats per measure and common chord progressions/strumming/picking patterns and intervals etc would be nice. There are plenty of places to find out how to play a certain style of music, but there doesn't seem to be many that cover a large list of them in a consistant way (articles by different people tend to have different use of terminology and such). It wouldn't hurt if it had examples using a single chord progression to show as an example. I have a book that does this to some degree as it covers various techniques but it really didn't give many details (and country rock and blues were all lumped together usually).
I prefer websites if possible to books.
what i would do is go to Wikipedia and look up the genre of music that you want to know about.
They usually have some information on that
Is there a guide to musical styles available somewhere, things like what makes a song a rock song or a country song.
.....
but there doesn't seem to be many that cover a large list of them in a consistant way (articles by different people tend to have different use of terminology and such).
That's the thing about art. It's subjective. It doesn't fit into neat little categories.
Every person is going to have their own slightly different set of boxes to try and organize the world into, and they are never going to see music exactly the same way.
Some people might see CCR as country.
Is Johnny Cash rock, pop, or folk?
Some see Bigg & Rich as rock (or pop).
I used to work at a country radio station who played Jimmy Buffet.
There's a reason that there are thousands of named musical genres.
If you ask 10 people to use those to categorize a list of songs, you'll most likely get 10 different lists.
I wrapped a newspaper ’round my head
So I looked like I was deep
Since you live in the US, you are blessed with the ability to still listen to Pandora Internet Radio. Just type in a song, or artist, and it will play songs and artists whose music is similarily composed. As well every song has a little info byte on what features they used in selecting that track.
Fun and informative.
Give http://www.allmusic.com a try, they give a nice description and example of styles in the bar under the search box.
"...I don't know - but whasomever I do, its gots ta be FUNKY!"
