FEATURE: Metal 101 – face-melting guitar tones
Let’s have a look at a trio different styles of metal, and how the music influences the general setup.
CLASSIC METAL Chances are, if you’re playing less distortion-drenched heavy rock, or metal with a bit of a 70s twist, the sound you’re hearing in your head is a Gibson Les Paul and Marshall stack. This kind of rig can be assembled on a budget, but if you spend big money you’ll probably feel better about yourself, and bragging rights are fun.
For this kind of tone, it’s more about the impact of the note than the level of distortion. Try keeping the gain at moderate levels rather than boosting the hell out of it, and maybe jack your guitar strings up a few millimetres. This will add bottom end to the tone and allow you to really dig in. All that extra wallop will make for a crushing, crunchy, natural metal tone. It’s important to let the sound breathe, as this type of music has a lot more open space than later, ‘chuggachugga’ metal, so don’t go overboard on the preamp or pedal distortion. Some is good, a lot is too much. Crank your amp to get that punch and grind.
THRASH Good old thrash. Oh that it were 1987 again. The main feature of this sound is that scooped mid, tightly compressed tone perfected on Metallica’s Master of Puppets album. To get this sound, try an EMG active pickup (the ‘81’ model is a good place to start), run it into an amp with the midrange turned down, and try using higher wattage speakers which won’t distort easily – let the distortion come from the amp and/or pedals rather than the speakers so you can maintain the bass frequencies so important to this sound. To get the perfect level of distortion, start with turning your gain all the way up, start chugging out on the open E string, and slowly dial the gain back until you find the sweet spot where there’s still a good amount of edge, but that fizzy sizzle between notes disappears. Also, try running rackmounted compressor and BBE Sonic Maximizer units in the amp’s effects loop to get that superior chug.
The technique is just as important as the gear for a classic thrash sound, so don’t be shy to pile on the palm muting, and pepper your playing with lots of little grace notes, slides, percussive chugs, and other fun and demonic stuff like that.
DIMEBAG The late great Dime deserves a section all by himself. His distinctive tone was the end result of a whole bunch of elements but aspects of his sound can be achieved with relative ease and a handful of bucks.
Dime favoured Bill Lawrence pickups early in his career before moving on to Seymour Duncan, with whom he designed the Dimebucker pickup. If you don’t have access to either of these, any high output pickup will do, or you can try to cheat and raise your pickup as close to the strings as you can without it getting in the way of the string’s vibration.
True Dime tone can only be achieved by scooping the heck out of the midrange. The best way to do this is with a graphic EQ in the effects loop, set for a harsh “V” curve. Next, run the EQ into a noise gate to tighten up those power metal stop-start rhythms. Again, high efficiency speakers will help transfer more of that glorious low end. Dime always had his tech turn off the noise gate when he played a solo, so keep that in mind so you don’t end up chopping off the sustain of longer notes while you’re wailing away.
NEWS: Another new Washburn Nuno limited edition
Boogie Street is commissioning several runs of these High Gloss Padauk N4s. Each run will be a numbered run of 7 guitars, and each run will be slightly different in hardware color and/or other subtle differences. They will all feature a high gloss Padauk N4 body and an oil finish padauk neck, plus Nuno’s specs including the Bill Lawrence Bridge humbucker and the Seymour Duncan ‘59 in the neck.
Hit up Boogie Street Guitars for more info.
CLICK HERE to buy Extreme’s new album, Saudades de Rock and CLICK HERE for a recent I Heart Guitar story about the Washburn N3 Nuno Bettencourt limited edition and Nuno’s new signature Randall amp.
NEWS: New Nuno Washburn guitar, Randall amp
Nuno Bettencourt’s signature Randall amplifier will be officially unveiled at Winter NAMM in January 2009, but Nuno fans won’t have to wait until then to snag a unique piece of signature gear.
As posted at the Extreme band forums, Funky Munky Music is awaiting delivery of a very limited run Washburn N3, based on Nuno’s third ever Washburn prototype, which had a maple fretboard and two Bill Lawrence L500 pickups. The standard Nuno model, the N4, has a Seymour Duncan 59 in the neck in addition to a bridge L500.
There was a Korean-produced model called the N3 for a while, but the new limited edition N3s are made in the USA. They have 22 frets, unlike Nuno’s original which had 24, and feature an original Floyd Rose bridge, a birdseye maple neck and fretboard, the original 1 5/8” nut width, and the original N4 neck profile. Interestingly, at the Extreme forum, Funky Munky says Nuno asked Washburn to revert the neck profile of the N4 to the original shape within the last month or so, and change the nut width to 1 5/8” instead of the current 1 11/16” nut width.
As for that Randall amp, in an official press release Nuno says “There is a reason that I have never endorsed any amplifier company exclusively. Because I have always had to jump back and forth from amp to amp. One for rhythm, Another for solos. A different amp on every recording and tour, constantly searching, unsatisfied. Always good, but not great. Never finding that perfect tone. There was always something missing. Basically, I gave in and truly believed that Marshall would be the staple to fall back on… The Constant.”
As a bonus, it looks like no other amp and cabinet before it… the look takes the past into the future.”
I found the image of the amp at the What’s That Dude Play? blog.
For more about the very interesting saga of Bill Lawrence pickups, check out the Bill Lawrence Review website.
Click here to buy Extreme’s new album, Saudades de Rock
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com