[j2bax]

Maybe your Berkeley grad metal practitioners like Dream Theater and probably a lot of metal in the last decade or two (since the internet and YouTube) but I imagine a lot of garage metal bands from the 70’s and 80’s were probably just playing/writing by feel and a loose understanding of music theory. I’m sure producers helped bring it all together on the album.

[zaps]

Cliff was the music nerd of the group, James especially leaned on him to learn a lot of theory

[dagw]

Yea, I think we can roughly split metal into pre-90s and post-90s, with 'modern' metal being a lot musical and precise. Just looking at all the people I know that have been in bands, the more into music theory they are, the more likely they are to be in a metal band.