Genres · Reference
105 genres. One blend sheet.
Eleven metal clusters and nine rock clusters, a five-step heaviness scale, four force sliders — Chaos, Gravity, Speed, Density — and a hybrid-depth control. Pick a dominant genre, optionally a secondary one to fuse in, and the panel fixed to the bottom of the screen writes up a blend sheet naming what's dominant, what's secondary, and what the sliders imply about mode, rhythm, riff shape, form and articulation.
Beginner guide. Off keeps the codex compact. On keeps every force-band and heaviness-band tip expanded at once, for reading start to finish before you pick anything.
01 · The Genre Codex
105 genres, filterable and searchable.
Every card carries a family badge (Metal or Rock) that reads by border style and glyph, never by colour alone, plus its cluster name as plain text. Browse here, then pick your dominant and secondary genre in the composer below.
02 · The Composer
Dominant genre, secondary genre, hybrid depth.
Hybrid depth decides how much of the secondary genre's cluster gets pulled into the written blend — low depth stays close to the dominant genre alone, high depth pulls in cross-cluster influence.
Heaviness
03 · Forces
Chaos, Gravity, Speed, Density.
Four independent axes, each with its own badge — border style plus glyph — and each interpreted across five bands. These feed the derived layers below directly.
04 · Derived Layers
What the sliders imply.
Five read-outs computed live from Heaviness and the four Forces above — nothing here is a separate input, every one of these updates the moment you move a slider.
How categories stay readable without colour. Genre family (Metal vs Rock) is a solid vs. dashed border plus a distinct glyph. Force type (Chaos, Gravity, Speed, Density) is a dotted / solid-heavy / double / dashed border, again each with its own glyph. Heaviness is ordinal, so it needs no glyph at all — it's carried the way the estate's sonic-spectrum pattern carries level: fill lightness and border weight climbing step by step, exactly as position implies. This follows the same method the estate's RERA developer index (vkjindia/tricity-rera-developer-index.html) established first, for a four-state badge carried entirely by stroke style, fill and glyph.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Blast beat" — tempo (commonly 200+ BPM), mechanism, and grindcore/black/death metal usage. Accessed 29 Jul 2026.
- Drumming.com, "Blast Beats: The Extreme Art of Drumset Speed" — sixteenth-note kick/snare/cymbal division at extreme tempo.
- Wikipedia, "Phrygian dominant scale" — interval structure (the fifth mode of harmonic minor, 1–♭2–3–4–5–♭6–♭7).
- Guitar World, "Using the Harmonic Minor Scale and Phrygian-Dominant Mode to Create Neoclassical Metal-Style Solos" — association with neoclassical metal.
- Revolver and Guitar World, on the origin of the word "djent" — an onomatopoeia for palm-muted, low-tuned, distorted chugging, associated with Meshuggah's Fredrik Thordendal and popularised by Misha Mansoor of Periphery; treated on this page as a style descriptor rather than a single clean coining event, since sources describe an informal, disputed origin story.
- Sweetwater 8-string tuning guide and Strandberg Guitars — 7- and 8-string standard tunings, used consistently with the Tone Architect tool's Tuning group on this site.
- General, widely-corroborated genre characterisation (tempo, instrumentation, structural conventions) for the remaining 100 genres — no single specific historical claim (an exact founding year or a sole named originator) is asserted for any genre on this page; where sources disagreed or a claim couldn't be pinned to a specific reference, the description was kept general rather than published as a precise fact.
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