Rock
Origins
Rock became popular in the 1960's. It evolved from 1950's Rock ‘n’ Roll. There are many subgenres of rock, including surf rock, hard rock, psychedelic, progressive and indie rock.
Musical Fingerprints
Instrumentation: Vocals (use of falsetto and other vocal techniques), electric guitar, bass guitar, drums. Progressive rock bands started to include synths and orchestral instruments into their songs.
Melody: Lots of guitar solos and riffs. “Many of the bands from this time had a background in blues music: they incorporated some elements of this with the heavier sounds they were using, to make heavy, bluesy riffs, and developed songs from these."
Structure: Most songs had a basic verse-chorus structure. However, progressive (prog) rock bands started to experiment with structure and started to favour long instrumental sections and through composed structure. This lead to the development of the concept album.
Harmony: Power chords and modal harmony are quite common in many styles of rock music. Many bands in the 90's, however, were very much inspired by the harmonic simplicity of early rock bands from the 60's.
Lyrical content: lyrics were often about “cars, women and blue-collar work."
Technological Fingerprints
Exploitation of the most modern technology.
Would have originally been recorded on early multitrack tape machines.
Overdubbing became more widely used through the development of rock.
Applying distortion to the electric guitar is a key part of the sound of rock, unless you are an indie-rock band from the 1980s and prefer the sound of the jangly guitar (undistorted, treble heavy guitar sound)
Rock also spurred on the development of guitar pedals and modulation effects.
Artists
The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Oasis, Led Zeppelin, Beach Boys, David Bowie, The Smiths