Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1996

Symphonic metal

Emerged 1996 Origin Finland / Netherlands Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
6
Speed
6
Melody
10

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Full orchestra and choir treated as equal instruments, usually with an operatic female lead. Metal's most visible face in the European mainstream.

How it sounds

  • Orchestra and choir as a permanent section, often recorded live rather than sampled.
  • Classically trained or lyrical female vocals, sometimes alternating with growls.
  • Broad, multi-layered production with film-score dynamics.

Hear what that means

  • Orchestra as the lead

    Nightwish - Once

    Ten minutes with a real orchestra carrying the melody and the guitars underneath as a floor. The arrangement problem is audible: strings and distorted guitar occupy the same frequencies, and one is always being carved out for the other.

    Open on YouTube
  • An actual choir from 1:43

    Therion - Theli

    Not stacked overdubs of one singer but a hired choir singing in parts, which is the difference between this genre and power metal's version of the same idea.

    Open on YouTube at 1:43
  • Beauty and the beast from 21:12

    Epica - The Divine Conspiracy

    A trained mezzo against a death growl, alternating by section. The arrangement is a genre convention, and this is a clean example of it working structurally rather than as contrast for its own sake.

    Open on YouTube at 21:12

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
110-160 bpm
Song length
4-7 min
Tuning
D or C standard for weight, and the guitars are frequently the least important thing in the arrangement — the orchestra sets the key and the band follows.
Production
Cinematic, and expensive: real orchestras and choirs on the records that can afford them, sample libraries on those that cannot. The mix problem is that an orchestra and a distorted guitar occupy the same frequencies, so one of them is always being carved out.
Written about
Myth and fairy tale, Grief, Grandeur for its own sake, Narrative across a whole album

What each part is doing

  • Orchestra The lead instrument, not the garnish. Strings carry the melody, brass carries the weight, and the guitars are usually doubling a line somebody else wrote.
  • Guitar Down-tuned and rhythmic, mixed lower than in any other metal genre, existing to give the orchestra a floor to stand on.
  • Vocals A trained soprano or mezzo in the classical tradition, frequently against a male harsh vocal — the 'beauty and the beast' arrangement the genre is known for.
  • Drums Double kick under orchestral hits, with the fills timed to the arrangement rather than to the riff. The drummer is playing to a score.
  • Choir Used as a section rather than as backing vocals, and on the bigger records an actual one — which is the difference between this and power metal's stacked overdubs.

What it isn't

That the orchestra is there to make it sound expensive. Where it works, the orchestra is doing something the guitars cannot: sustaining harmony underneath riffs that are rhythmically busy and harmonically static, which is metal's oldest structural limitation. That is also why the genre lives or dies on arrangement rather than on riffs, and why a symphonic metal record with a bad arranger sounds far worse than a bad record in almost any other genre here.

Told apart from

  • Power metal Power metal stacks its own voices into a choir and uses keyboards for the orchestra. Symphonic metal hires both, and lets them lead.
  • Gothic metal Gothic metal has the same female-vocal-and-heavy-guitar arrangement, and grew out of doom — slower, sadder, and without the orchestral ambition.
  • Symphonic black metal Symphonic black metal uses the same orchestral vocabulary for menace rather than for grandeur, and keeps the shriek and the blast beat.
  • Progressive metal Both are ambitious and long-form. Prog metal's complexity is rhythmic and harmonic; symphonic metal's is orchestrational, and its metres are usually plain.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Therion was the first to systematically replace riffs with orchestration, in the mid-1990s. Nightwish combined the formula with power metal and operatic vocals and became one of Europe's best-selling bands. In the Netherlands, Within Temptation and Epica built a whole scene, and the genre is now metal's most visible face in the continental mainstream.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Post-grunge 1.7 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Easycore 1.7 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Hard rock 2.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.