New Prog - Characteristics - Musical Aspects - Instrumentation

Instrumentation

Early progressive rock groups expanded the timbral palette of the then-traditional rock instrumentation of guitar, keyboard, bass guitar, and drums by adding instruments more typical of folk music, jazz or music in the classical tradition. A number of bands, especially at the genre's onset, recorded albums in which they performed together with a full orchestra. The Moody Blues, who until then had been a blues-based British invasion band with a single hit to their credit, launched the trend with the huge success of their Days of Future Passed album. Days used arrangements that combined the band and orchestra, and it used orchestral interludes to bridge together the individual songs.

It was impractical to work together with an orchestra on a regular basis, so the Moody Blues turned to the Mellotron as a substitute. The Mellotron is an instrument that contains tape loops of recorded instruments and plays back their sounds when the keyboard is pressed. Its sounds included woodwinds, choirs, brass and, most famously, strings. Limitations of the technology meant that its sounds were not exact reproductions of the instruments, but instead had a wobbly, muted quality that many bands prized. This instrument became the signature sound of the Moody Blues and was closely associated with many later progressive rock acts including Genesis, Strawbs, Pink Floyd and King Crimson.

The Hammond organ is another instrument closely associated with progressive rock. It is a versatile instrument that can function like a pipe organ, can be played through a guitar amplifier for a distorted tone, can make percussive sounds, and is very effective as a lead instrument.

The birth of progressive rock roughly coincided with the availability of commercially available synthesizers. Early modular synthesizers were large instruments that used patch cords to route the signal flow. Programming the instruments meant manually routing the patch cords. The Minimoog, a small synthesizer with pre-wired routings, began production in 1971 and provided keyboardists with an instrument that could imitate other instruments, could create new sounds of its own, and was highly portable and affordable. Progressive rock was the genre in which the synthesizer first became established as a common part of popular music. Rapid, virtuosic solos played by progressive rock keyboardists led the keyboard to be viewed as a masculine instrument, as opposed to the feminine image it had when the piano was the primary keyboard instrument.

Progressive rock bands often use instruments in ways different from their traditional roles. The role of the bass may be expanded from its traditional rhythm section function into that of a lead instrument. This is often accompanied by the use of an instrument such as a Rickenbacker bass, whose sound contains an unusually large amount of treble frequencies, or a Chapman Stick, which is operated with both hands on the fretboard and allows polyrhythmic and chordal playing. Guitar may be dispensed with altogether.