Can anyone tell me why P.Floyd is prog?

erlenst wrote: Certif1ed wrote: Let's drop the notions of long complex arrangements, complexity and all the other nonsense that tends to go with describing prog for a moment. Prog Rock is not about being hideously complex, or being able to improvise for hours on end -although Pink Floyd more than demonstrated their abilities on their earliest output. In fact, if you think about it, everything after Meddle was one concept per album - the Wall being the ultimate consumation of coherent concept-building. The biggest problem with Pink Floyd as a Prog Rock band that I see is modern perception of Prog Rock - which seems to have little or nothing to do with actual Prog Rock, and more to do with casual sources of reference like Wikipedia, which is one of the worst sources of information about music that I have ever seen - simply because of all the opinionated and factually inaccurate articles therein. Prog Rock is defined by the bands who were there first - the bands who defined Prog Rock. Pink Floyd are one of those bands. That's why they're Prog   Actually I think wikipedia's article about progressive rock is excellent and follow pretty much the same definition as this very site does.. I really have no idea what you are talking about .

I can tell.

This site got the definition from Wikipedia, hence the similarities.

And if you haven't noticed the inaccuracies and bias, then you don't have a working definition of Prog

FragileDT wrote: Genesis doesn't play a million chords a minute and they sure are prog .

Genesis do play a milion chords a minute. of course there are those who play a bilion... ELP for example ;)

erlenst wrote: In other words you have a definition of prog which is different from the one on this site and 90% of the people in here. Sure, I agree that a lot of the stuff in wikipedia is inaccurate, such as the ridiculous art rock definition they have. But a lot of the stuff there is really great also, for instance a lot of the scientific articles.

That's not what I said - but it's probably true nonetheless - I note you don't actually disagree

Most people do not have a good working definition of Prog - and many who visit Internet forums get a lot of their information from the Internet. I have yet to see a "good" definition of Prog Rock on the Internet - this site included. Nothing's perfect.

I agree that some of Wikipedia is great - I didn't say it wasn't - I said it's "one of the worst sources of information about music that I have ever seen - simply because of all the opinionated and factually inaccurate articles therein.".

For example - the article on Twelve Note music is actually entitled Twelve Tone music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-note_music

And this article on Rock music is just an unstructured mess of opinions and potted histories of author's favourites;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_music

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

erlenst wrote: Ok, I can definately see your point. I wonder though how anyone who obviously knows a lot of the theory behind Twelve Note couldn't get the name straight However, I would like to see your definition of prog, if that doesn't too off topic. Not that it's even particularly important, after all it doesn't matter what we call the music as long as it's awesome

I'm working on a full encyclopaedia entry type definition of Prog Rock. I doubt I'll get it finished until the New Year - but in a nutshell, I think that Prog Rock is defined by the bands that defined it back in the early 1970s, and, as such, it is virtually undefinable...

Or is that too confusing

Maybe I should just leave the definition at "It's awesome"

• Prominent use of electronic instrumentation — particularly keyboard instruments such as the organ, piano, Mellotron, and Moog synthesizer, in addition to the usual rock combination of electric guitar, bass and drums.

They used all those instruments, except I'm not sure about Moog and Mellotron. 

Mellotron is used on Saucerful of Secrets & Ummagumma albums (and related singles e.g. Julia Dream) and Synthesiser (as opposed to the more specific Moog) is all over Dark Side (VCS3) and Wish & Animals (Oberheim & others)