Instrumentals

aka: Instrumental

An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics or any other sort of vocal music; all of the music is produced by musical instruments. This term is used when referring to popular music rather than to other musical genres such as European classical music. In commercial music, instrumental tracks are sometimes renditions of a corresponding release that features vocals, but may also be compositions originally conceived without vocals. An instrumental version of a song which otherwise features vocals is also known as a −1 (pronounced minus one).

Instrumental Theme Tune is a subtrope where the opening theme of a show is an instrumental.

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Examples:

Music Albums

• The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings by Louis Armstrong is a compilation box set of four CD's with all the recordings of his bands between 1925 and 1928. Historically important as being the progenitor of all jazz and popular music that would follow. Almost all tracks are predominantly instrumental, with some occasional scatting, singing or talking.
• Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come.
• John Coltrane: All of his albums were instrumental, including Blue Train, Giant Steps and My Favorite Things.
• Dick Dale: On his album Surfers Choice several tracks are instrumentals, including the iconic "Let's Go Trippin'" and "Misirlou".
• Miles Davis: Most of his albums were jazz instrumentals, including Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew.
• Deep Purple's Live Album Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969) with the London Symphonic Orchestra is mostly instrumental, save for a few songs.
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Live Album Pictures at an Exhibition (1973) is also mostly a straightforward rock performance of Modest Mussorgsky's famous score, though it does feature some singing here and there.
• Brian Eno: Many of his albums are instrumental, including Ambient 1: Music for Airports and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Many of his other albums only have vocals on a handful of songs (Another Green World is a good example of this).
• Gong: All but two of Pierre Moerlen's Gong (1976-1982; 1986) albums were all instrumentals, and on the other two, Moerlen provides vocals.
• Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters is entirely instrumental, Future Shock too, save for two sung tracks.
• Lovelyz: Muse on Music is a 33-track long instrumental album. Their other albums also start with an instrumental intro song.
• Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um.
• Thelonious Monk: Brilliant Corners.
• St Germain: Tourist, save for the tracks "Rose Rouge" and "Sure Thing", which have a few sampled lyrics.
• Frank Zappa: Also released a number of albums with predominantly instrumental compositions, including Hot Rats, Waka/Jawaka, The Grand Wazoo, Orchestral Favorites, The Perfect Stranger, Francesco Zappa, Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar, Guitar, London Symphony Orchestra, Jazz from Hell and The Yellow Shark.
• Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos features compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach played on a Moog synthesizer.
• Most of Jean-Michel Jarre's albums are almost all entirely instrumental, including Oxygène. Zoolook kind of straddles the line with vocal samples. In fact, Revolutions from 1988 was Jarre's first album that included one song with lyrics, albeit vocoded. Metamorphoses and the two Electronica albums still include a number of instrumentals in between songs with vocals.
• Nearly all of John Zorn's music, including Radio with Naked City, is instrumental.
• An interesting case with progressive sludge metal band The Ocean. Pelagial was originally going to be an entirely instrumental album as Loic's throat was recovering. When he recovered, the band felt that as the frontman, he was needed, and recorded vocals. The album usually includes both a version with vocals and an instrumental version.
• Pink Floyd's last album, The Endless River (2014), is entirely instrumental, save for the last track, "Louder Than Words".
• An Endless Sporadic are Progressive Rock that only write instrumentals.
• NateWantsToBattle's Instrumentals consists of instrumental versions of 16 previously released tracks.
• Nine Inch Nails's Ghosts albums, consisting of Ghosts I-IV (2008) and Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts (both 2020), are all instrumental. The first is rather experimental and ambient, while the latter two are more concept albums. NIN also released The Fragile: Deviations I (2017), which removes the lyrics from the already instrumental-heavy The Fragile (1999), along with some previously unreleased material.
• Rob Dougan's Furious Angels was released in vocal and instrumental versions. He may have got the idea from former collaborator Andrea Parker, who did the same thing with her debut Kiss My Arp.
• C418 has 22 albums on his Bandcamp page. A majority of his tunes are lacking in vocals, with 148, the album that compiles some of his less...refined official works into one area. What he's most renowned for is the production of the sounds of Minecraft, from the tracks included in 'Survival' mode in the first album, to the 'Creative' mode tracks in the second album. Minecraft players don't actually consider learning who creates the music by name and only learn the game's name by the music.
• Dream Theater sister project Liquid Tension Experiment, which has released three albums, which are all entirely instrumental.
• The Dutch progressive rock band Focus, while typically having one or two songs with lyrics on each album, primarily does instrumentals.
• Noah: During the transition between being named Peterpan and Noah, they released Suara Lainnya^note Other Sounds which mostly consisted of instrumental arrangement of Peterpan songs. The exception being "Cobalah Mengerti" which has vocals from fellow Musica Studio artist Momo of Geisha and "Dara" which is the vocalist Ariel's solo single.
• The Human League's The Dignity of Labour, Pts. 1-4 EP.
• The majority of Dutch Italo Disco duo Laserdance's output is instrumental. When their songs do have vocals, they're mostly vocodered Indecipherable Lyrics.
• Anders Enger Jensen's first two albums were entirely instrumental; it wasn't until Retro Grooves Vol. 3 that he began producing songs with lyrics.
• BT's debut album Ima is almost completely instrumental except for "Loving You More"(f/ Vincent Covello) and "Blue Skies"(f/ Tori Amos).
• Kraftwerk's first three albums were purely instrumental. Their first song with vocals was the Title Track of Autobahn, the rest of said album still consisting of instrumentals.

Music Singles

• Most of the music on OverClocked ReMix is entirely instrumental. This is a mix of the fact that people who frequent the site prefer it and that singing talent is in short supply compared to what's put into the rest of the remix.
• "Popcorn" - Gershon Kingsley (1969) - Perhaps the most covered instrumental ever with about 72 different versions.
  • "Popcorn" by M&H Band.
  • And of course Hot Butter's hit version.
• "Music Box Dancer" - Frank Mills (1974, rereleased in 1978) - To many, this is the tune that plays when the ice cream truck passes by their homes.
• "The Hustle" - Van McCoy (1975)
• "A Fifth of Beethoven"- Walter Murphy (1976)
• "Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band"- Meco (1977)
• "Chariots of Fire" - Vangelis (1981)
• "YYZ" - Rush (1981)
• "Bad Horsie" by - Steve Vai
• "Surfing with the Alien" and so many others that there are too many to list - Joe Satriani
• " Eruption" - Van Halen (the band's first albums have plenty of these, such as "Spanish Fly", "Cathedral", Intruder", and "1984"; in later days, there's also "316")
• Metallica have one of each of the first four albums ("Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)", "The Call Of Ktulu", "Orion" and "To Live is to Die" - though the first opens with Studio Chatter, and the last, has a short spoken part), and Death Magnetic revived the tradition with "Suicide & Redemption".
• "(Christmas Eve) Sarajevo 12/24" - Trans-Siberian Orchestra
• Queen's "Procession"
• "Jessica" and "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed" - The Allman Brothers Band.
  • A remix of Jessica serves as the theme song to Top Gear.
  • Covered by They Might Be Giants
• "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" - Jeff Beck (from the instrumental album Blow by Blow)
  • Ditto for any covers of the tune, like those made for Spy Hunter games.
• Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers had two singles recorded during its sessions - appropriately titled "Instrumental #1" and "Instrumental #2" - both of which, unfortunately, didn't make it onto the album but were released as B-sides.
• "Frankenstein" by Edgar Winter
• "Foreplay" - Boston
• Pretty much the output of The Art of Noise
• "D.N.A." by A Flock of Seagulls.
• The Microphones had several instrumentals entitled "Instrumental".
• "Jordan" by Buckethead
• Pink Floyd has "On the Run", "Any Colour You Like", "Marooned", "Careful with That Axe Eugene", "Atom Heart Mother", and several others.
• "Bron-Yr-Aur" by Led Zeppelin
• "Last Ride In" and "Espionage" by Green Day
• Dream Theater has plenty. The Dance of Eternity is one of them.
• Irish band And So I Watch You From Afar and Japanese band té are outstanding bands both doing nothing but instrumentals.
• Post-rock bands Explosions in the Sky and Pelican are entirely instrumental. Mogwai only have a handful of songs with singing. Godspeed You! Black Emperor sometimes use Spoken Word in Music (and in one brief and almost inaudible case Scatting) but are otherwise entirely instrumental.
• "Something for the Ages"- Hammerfall
• "Misirlou": Dick Dale's badass Surf Rock version from Pulp Fiction. There are also the Surf Rock instrumentals on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack: "Surf Rider" by the Lively Ones, "Bustin' Surfboards" by the Tornados, and "Bullwinkle Part II" by The Centurions.
• Franco De Vita: All of his songs have lyrics (him being a songwriter makes it a given) except for "Otoño" (Autumn), which is the last track of the album Voces a mi alrededor. The entire composition is a wistful melody reminiscent of New Age songs.
• Even older and a masterpiece by Joe Meek: "Telstar" by the Tornados.
• "1980-F" by After the Fire, at least in Germany.
• "Oxygène 4" from Oxygène, "Equinoxe 4" and 5, and "Magnetic Fields 2" by Jean-Michel Jarre.
• "Magic Fly" by Space (no, not that Space).
• "Samba Pa Ti" by Santana.
• "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copland. And by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
• "Cinema" by Yes.
• "Behind My Camel" by The Police.
• "Un Fantasma Tra Noi (A Ghost Between Us)" by Lacuna Coil
• Savatage is fond of instrumental tracks:
  • Hall Of The Mountain King: "Prelude to Madness", a Rock Me, Amadeus! metal arrangement of Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King", and "Last Dawn".
  • Gutter Ballet: "Temptation Revelation" and "Silk and Steel".
  • Edge Of Thorns: "Exit Music".
  • Handful of Rain: "Visions".
  • Dead Winter Dead features "Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)" which was arguably their most popular song and the smash hit of their spin-off project the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
  • The Wake of Magellan: "Underture" and "the Storm".
• Chimaira's 13-minute Implements of Destruction mixes this with Epic Rocking.
• Emilie Autumn has a double album called Laced/Unlaced, which has both electric violin instrumentals and classical covers and one or two songs she wrote herself on Violin.
• Nightwish has at least one instrumental per album.
• Apocalyptica does almost entirely instrumentals. It helps that they don't actually have a vocalist in their lineup and all of their songs with lyrics are sung by guest vocalists.
• "Classical Gas" by Mason Williams.
• "From Skin to Liquid" by Cannibal Corpse.
• "Theme for Great Cities" by Simple Minds. And that's only their really popular instrumental!
• "Patricia's Park" and "Colours" by Alphaville.
• All of Celldweller's Soundtrack for the Voices in my Head and Blue Stahli's Antisleep albums.
• Revocation has seven instrumentals among its five albums; the Teratogenesis EP is their only release without one.
• Todd Rundgren did a lot of instrumental songs, of which the most blatant example is the thirty-five-minute "A Treatise on Cosmic Fire" from Initiation.
• GaMetal mainly does instrumental songs, excluding two. Justified because the songs are all remixes of songs from Video Games, which are for the most part instrumental.
• Macabre's Nostradamus from their album "Gloom".
• Cormorant have "Voices of the Mountain", "Confusion of Tongues" and "Eris".
• "Nenia" and "Phantoms (Of the Oath)" by Dismember.
• "Root Beer Rag" by Billy Joel.
• If you've ever commented on a YouTube video asking what song is being used as background music, no matter what the song actually is, someone will probably tell you that it's "Sandstorm" by Darude.
• Vision Divine has "Forgotten Worlds" from Vision Divine; "Incipit" and "Nemesis" from Send Me An Angel; "In The Light", "Fool's Garden" and "The Fall of Reason" from Stream of Consciousness; and "Waiting for the Dawn" from The 25th. Hour.
• ABBA, whose trademark otherwise is their female harmony vocals, had two officially-released instrumentals, "Intermezzo No. 1" from their self-titled album, and the Title Track from Arrival. "Gammal Fäbodpsalm", an old public domain tune, was also used to open their live shows.
• Decoded Feedback generally feature at least one instrumental per album, such as "Psy Storm" from Combustion, "Soultaker" from Aftermath(remixed With Lyrics on the following album), and "Dark Odyssey" from Diskonnekt.
• Color Theory has "The Past Yet to Come" on The Majesty of Our Broken Past, and "Lore" on Lucky Ago.
• La Düsseldorf's biggest hit, Rheinita.
• Eric Johnson's biggest hit was the Grammy Award-winning instrument "Cliffs of Dover"; most of his other singles have been instrumental as well.
• Blur often puts instrumental tracks in as hidden tracks or at the end of an album.
• Android Hearts by The Rain Within.
• Iron Maiden's "Transylvania", from their Self-Titled Album, and "Losfer Words(Big Orra)", from Powerslave.
• Vicious Pink's "8:15 to Nowhere", which serves as an Epic Instrumental Opener to their cover of Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire".
• Tubeway Army's "I Nearly Married A Human".
• S'Express have "Coma II (A.M./OK), the closer of their debut album Original Soundtrack.
• Information Society have "Charientism", recorded in 1982 but not released until the 2014 Updated Re-release of the Insoc EP, "Chemistry" from Hack, and "Ozar Midrashim" from Don't Be Afraid, which was used as the Real Song Theme Tune of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.
• Kano (of "I'm Ready" fame) have "Cosmic Voyager" on their self-titled debut LP.
• Interface has at least one per album, but Where All Roads Lead takes the cake with four instrumentals; "Message From Dystopia", "Who Watches The Watchers", "We Will Never Be Together", and "Hiraeth".
• "Song For Guy" by Elton John.
• "Rainforest" by Paul Hardcastle.
• Vandal Moon's "Nevermore", from Wild Insane.
• Robert Miles' Signature Song "Children" is one of the few instrumental trance singles to reach the Top 40 of the US Billboard Hot 100.
• Tomski's "14 Hours to Save The Earth" originally played this trope straight, but the Trouser Enthusiasts remix added a Spoken Word in Music intro.
• BBE's "Seven Days and One Week" is entirely instrumental apart from the "Oh-oh!" vocal sample.
• Chicane's best known instrumentals include "Offshore"(later reworked With Lyrics), "Sunstroke"(the original mix does have wordless vocals, but the Disco Citizens mix is a straight example), and "Halcyon"(no relation to the Orbital song).
• The title track of The Frozen Autumn's Pale Awakening, and "Winter(Reprise)" from Fragments of Memories.
• BT's "Embracing The Sunshine", "Quark", "Nocturnal Transmission", "Flaming June", "Godspeed", "Namaste", "The Rose of Jericho", etc. Emotional Technology is the only album of his that doesn't feature any instrumentals.
• Daft Punk have "Da Funk", "Phœnix", "Burnin'", "Revolution 909", "Robot Rock", et al.
• Nu Shooz have "Montecarlo Nite", from Told U So.
• Trans-X's "Digital World", aside from the Title Drop and the spoken-word line "computer control".
• The KLF's "What Time Is Love?" was originally an instrumental, but later rearranged With Lyrics.
• Underworld's "Born Slippy", the parent single to the much more famous vocal B-Side "Born Slippy.NUXX".
• Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F", from Beverly Hills Cop.
• Agnelli & Nelson's "Embrace", "Everyday"(original mix, most remixes are With Lyrics), "Hudson Street", and "Vegas". "El Niño" is a borderline example with spoken-word vocals.

Other

• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "The Thing Lay Still", an instrumental brass rendition of Lestat's Villain Love Song "Come to Me" (which was composed by Daniel Hart and sung by Sam Reid) plays during Louis and Lestat's dance at the Mardi Gras ball.

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