The post about the Top 10 Metal Guitar Tones last month generated much discussion. Some of the most interesting comments were by Matt Altieri, who plays guitar for Ferrous Oxide and Deceased. (Deceased begin a US West Coast tour tomorrow – see dates here.) He suggested a post about unconventional tones in metal. I suggested that he write it. So he did. – C.L.
That’s top 10 BEST unconventional, not MOST unconventional. I’m inclined to favor the act of guitar playing over less tactile forms of signal processing, but the way technology shapes the character of the playing is undoubtedly important. Gear can smoothly facilitate a guitar concept, just as often as it can twist ideas into unrecognizable forms. Some guitarists use technological limitations to focus creativity, while others battle against them in earnest, casting novel sparks. At any rate, there’s no convention without context. I talked to some of these artists and received very gracious and comprehensive responses. (See complete responses and gory technical details here.) Now with the future of creativity at stake, check out the texture and consistency of independent spirit’s roar.
Guitar photo by nigeljohnwade
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TOP 10 UNCONVENTIONAL METAL GUITAR TONES
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10. Bewitched (Swe) – Pentagram Prayer
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The midrange snarl of Vivian Campbell’s classic Dio performances meets the cold, expansive sounds of archetypal Scandinavian BM like Mayhem’s DMDS or Immortal’s Pure Holocaust. Vargher takes advantage of the bass-less clarity by welding rich chord coloration into precise speed picking, and comes up with some of the catchiest ’80s metal riffs of the ’90s.
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9. Hemlock – Lust for Fire
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A thought on lo-fi recording from Balth, aka Dan Lilker: “No, actually Lust for Fire was done on my Roland VS-1680, a portable hard-disk recorder as digital as they come. When people say you can’t get a warm, natural sound from a digital recorder, I doubt they’re using the right recording methods. Not that Lust is a very warm record, of course!” Hemlock quadruple-tracked their live tones, and boosted the most abrasive frequencies in the final mix. Most of the riffs on Lust for Fire burn brightly in the distance, but when the guitarists dig in their heels, the visceral heaviness pops out like a trompe-l’oeil effect. That billowing sound caused by the chugging on …And Justice for All? Hemlock were considerate enough to track it for you, so no matter how sensibly you adjust your stereo for “Beyond the Threshold of Pain (Stormwatch)”, you get to hear the sound of unruly force punching speakers out. Also of note is the guitar solo, which sounds like a trumpet melting inside a volcano.
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8. Master’s Hammer – Ritual
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The lush production of Master’s Hammer’s debut contains a distinctly un-lovely guitar tone. The riffs are bulky and well-represented, but there’s a weird insectile buzz to the high end that the band exploits in their material. The fuzz characteristic lends a mangled edge to thrash, and becomes demonically “vocal” in the lilting, octave-based melodies that comprise the album’s most memorable moments.
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7. Godflesh – Us and Them
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Justin Broadrick was all proud of himself in this era for being un-metal and making guitars sound like keyboards. They’re tiny by Godflesh standards, but remain the focal point in a suddenly empty space. The low end has a cool hollowness, like a cracked bell, but it’s the higher pitches where the tone seems to have affected Broadrick’s approach to guitar playing. If you’ve messed around EQ’ing a distorted guitar, you’ve noticed that some restrictive settings can dramatically blur the line between a note and its harmonic overtone. Us and Them is full of silvery, twining non-melodies that benefit from this modulating effect, also embellished with reverb and endless delay.
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6. Usurper – Diabolosis/Threshold of the Usurper/Skeletal Season
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The quest for ultimate heaviness warped Usurper’s early music into an insanely aggressive yet headphone-worthy experience, like being simultaneously bludgeoned with and drowned in guitars. The tone combines the high-impact slam of Asphyx, the textural grind of Entombed, and a queasy sense of depth I’ve heard nowhere else. Rick Scythe used a DOD Octoplus pedal to thicken the solid state crunch of his 1985 Crate G-150 amp head, subtly enhancing the amp’s distortion without the lower octave becoming audible. Scythe also had a practice of tuning his instrument slightly flat before recording a doubled version of each guitar part, creating a moaning chorus that is particularly effective when he emphasizes the fifths in power chords. Frequent wah-abuse adds a certain infuriating edge to riffs that buzz like a slap in the ear. “Acid hits and razor blades”, indeed.
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5. Dawnbringer – Catharsis Instinct
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The guitars on this album were recorded direct-in through a preset on a Digitech preamp with late ’90s cabinet-simulating effects. The clean wiry tone is little more than an extreme close-up of the fretboard, which makes sense when you consider that Dawnbringer is essentially the Idea of Metal pursued with a certain Motörhead-like bravado. Chris Black transcribes endlessly dynamic harmony riffs out of his head onto music notation paper, and Scott Hoffman executes them with fierce precision. Every slight string buzz and slipped note is laid bare in amp-less clarity, adding pathos to the drama of a great battle moving from ideal to actual.
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4. Order from Chaos – Stillbirth Machine
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Chuck Keller recalls, “I wanted to capitalize on the sound I stumbled on with 1989’s Crushed Infamy – which involved turning all the knobs to ten on a Boss Heavy Metal pedal…exactly the formula the Swedes had discovered at Sunlight Studios about the same time… only with Crushed Infamy, I was aiming for Assassin’s Interstellar Experience guitar sound”. He then fought with old equipment in a Kansas City studio for months to get the desired sound onto Order from Chaos’ debut. There are other reasons that the results don’t stand in line with Left Hand Path. For one, Entombed write basic riffs to fit the harmonic limitations of their trademark grind. The riffs on Stillbirth don’t yield to such limitations, streaming Voivod-inspired chords, manic time-shifts, and whammy bar pyrotechnics under a rubric of crushing black death. Add an impossible studio situation, and the result is a mercilessly un-musical churn, but with sophisticated ideas bursting to the surface at a constant rate. As a listening experience, Stillbirth Machine is both futuristic traditional metal and abstract noise. Some of its intended content inevitably remains hidden, a perpetual source of mystification and catalyst for imaginative play. Check out Keller’s Ares Kingdom work to hear the full range of guitar vocabulary combined with a godlike tone decades in the making, but don’t forget one of the most appropriate band name/album title combos in history.
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3. Zeni Geva – Freedom Bondage
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Rumor has it that this notoriously bass-less band ran their guitars through bass amps to get the sound on their albums. I tend to believe this. I spent a year and a half trying to make stolen Chaos A.D. riffs sound good through a bass amp and Danelectro Fab Metal pedal. Sometimes it sounded like Fu Manchu and sometimes like pure shit. At any rate, the weird gurgle of wrong amp voicing seems familiar. This is the most metallic Zeni Geva from both a textural and a compositional perspective, nice and abstract but founded on massive, warlike discipline.
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2. Anacrusis – Screams and Whispers
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Unlike most of the entries above, this one represents state-of-the-art perfection. Anacrusis dealt with the tone of guitars tuned down to B throughout their career, and they really nailed it on Screams and Whispers. But “it” is at an extreme remove from the sludgy conventions of extreme downtuning, kind of like if high-minded power metal were meant to sound as dangerous as Fear Factory. Multiple stages of EQ and a combination of digital control with tube overdrive went into sculpting this extremely clear, tight, laser-like sound. It shimmers with chorus-enhanced midrange and crumbles around the edges while upholding strains of dark melody. I actually bought Screams and Whispers as an afterthought the same day I picked up Soul of a New Machine 15 years ago, and I’ve gone through three copies since. This rebuttal has been a long time coming.
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1. Deep Purple – In Rock
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Maybe it’s trite to end with a rock icon. I just wanted to leave you with the mental image of Ritchie Blackmore standing on a table in the Marshall factory, blasting away with his Strat plugged into a partially assembled amp and yelling at hapless engineers for more compression. According to interviews, that was his role in helping to develop the legendary Marshall crunch. That said, I haven’t heard anybody try to replicate the sound on In Rock, a squall so temperamental that power chords are too subtle for its heaviest moments. One note will do. What Blackmore called “playing with electricity” previews both James Hetfield’s clipped staccato and the K.K. Downing/Kerry King lineage of whammy bar atonality. No one even needs to say, “Valhalla, I am coming”.
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For the full responses by guitarists interviewed for this post, see here.
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Cool selections, thanks!
I saw Zeni Geva live before I’d ever heard anything from them; the venue had a bare concrete floor and a low steel roof, and I thought I might never hear properly again. Unfortunately, none of their recordings really capture the insanity they displayed that day…
Not to sound like a d-bag, but I have an uncle who plays soccer with Ritchie Blackmore on weekends. Now that’s all he talks about when I see him. Weird. Anyway, Deep Purple rules.
Speed King has peerless crunch and tone. No one even tries to sound like that today.
It’s noteworthy that both Iommi and Blackmore have admitted to playing very trebly, though you might not tell from recordings. Iommi had Geezer (which is like a 2nd Iommi mind-meld on bass), and Ritchie had the keyboard player’s mids and lows to deal with. They simply kept to their own end of the sound spectrum.
I liked the Usurper and Hemlock tones.
Awesome topic…I’m not too familiar with most of the above, but it got me thinking of lots of others
I love Stephen O’Malley’s “clean” tone on Khanate’s Things Viral. I think it’s basically a Model T cranked through the Bright channel. He gets this tone like a rotting zombie AC/DC when he hits the heavy chords – overdriven and mangled. It totally cleans up when he plays light but you can still hear some feedback emerging behind the note due to the amp volume. The way he plays with that tone makes that record for me.
@Matt Altieri:
Great post. I’m at a computer with no speakers right now, but I can still “hear” most of these tones through your descriptions of them. Can’t wait to give them a listen later and compare my impressions with yours.
@Matt Vogt:
I saw Zeni Geva when they were touring w/ Today Is the Day in support of _Freedom Bondage_. They played at a small-ish club called the Toy Tiger, which, at the time, was mostly a venue for hair metal cover bands with names like Strutter, and they pretty much leveled the place. It was an intimidating and deafening experience that neither of those bands’ records come close to recreating.
Speaking of Today Is the Day, Steve Austin utilizes some odd guitar tones. His tone on _Sadness Will Prevail_, for example, is disconcertingly tinny and shrill.
I’ll have to check these out more, haven’t heard of most of them. some of my personal pics that are more well known Gorguts/Portal/Krallice
Nice to see the ZG love on here–I was obsessed with that band for a long time. I think it’s proper to mention Steve Albini’s engineering on these records–it’s unmistakably his, with booming drums and…that guitar sound. I don’t know what sort of guitars/effects/tunings KK Null uses, perhaps you all do. All I know is that it’s a monster of a tone, hard to replicate. Thanks for the post.
Glad to see Order from Chaos represented here.
Matt – I like you because you play in Deceased. Will you ever be recording with them?
Excellent topic from the indomitable Mr. Altieri! Fantastic work as usual!
That Hemlock tone is like an apocalyptic vacuum cleaner. The Godflesh tone you described is like some on the Jesu records. And, yes, that Anacrusis tone is great. Thanks for such a thoughtful and detailed post.
Alee – That’s a great insight (or at least speculation) into the Things Viral sound. I like the old school idea of overdriving an amp/speaker instead of just hitting some switch called “distortion”. I’ll have to give the record a more, um, attentive listen.
Fucking awesome post. I was not aware of some of these albums, I will be checking them out for sure.
I would guess from this interview (that should be clickable) that the Godflesh tone is pretty different than the Jesu tone in how it was produced because Justin Broadrick uses a lot of computer/digital effects and signal processing (Line 6 Pod and Amplitube) for Jesu, whereas Godflesh seemed to be a more “natural” amp and pedals kind of setup.
This is a really great piece, and the full version of it is well worth a look too.
Anacrusis = YES.
It’s not metal, but one of my favourite guitar tones ever is Meat Puppets’ “Backwater”.
I saw Order From Chaos with Ares Kingdom, Wastelander, and Kommandant last March. Chuck Keller’s tone is outrageous! If his guitar had zaps, he could out zap Patrick Mameli and Luc Lemay.
I was surprised not to see Voivod in this list, even though their guitar tone was achieved mostly on Piggy´s atypical tuning, it´s a great unconventional guitar tone nonetheless.
AVERSIONLINE said it all for me:
“Anacrusis = YES.”
Cheers!
//TB
Salutations Invisible Oranges. Some very interesting choices there, I shall look into Hemlock more. Thanks! I would also like to mention the tone on Beherit’s Drawing Down the Moon, such a black metal conjuration!
hat hemlock album is pure filth. one of the best US black metal bands ever.
The way someone described the omalley guitar song on things viral is exactly right. he used to refer to it as a”clean” sound. heh
After hearing that Bewitched sample I’m only left with one choice and that is to own that bastard. Any band that can you make you involuntarily throw the horns is a must own.
Wish there was more Zeni Geva gear info online, couldn’t really find any…
I almost stuck Today is the Day on here (Willpower or Temple for me), as well as Gorguts! Meat Puppets have some incredible guitar tones for sure, they’re one of my favorite bands ever. Also for non-metal, I have to mention Fred Gianelli’s work with Psychic TV. Incredible use of sustained feedback and swooping clean tremolo, kinda reminds me of Mark Knopfler in a twisted way. I recently discovered that Fred lives a mile down the street from me, stalking is scheduled to ensue any day now.
Miskatonic: so far I have only played on a 7″ called Unpleasant Scenarios (extremely appropriate title
). It’s a re-recorded version of “Haunted Cerebellum” and a cover of “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” definitely for maniacs only. Not sure what will happen on future recordings.
Excellent, excellent article. Hopefully one in a series of many. I love gearhead talk, especially when it’s not afraid to connect with aesthetics and philosophy of sound stuff.
My favourite non-metal non-typical guitar sounds go mainly to darkwave bands, I find. Ash from Bauhaus is usually my first choice. The metal wash of early Cocteau Twins. Also Adrian Belew in his various works and with King Crimson is my favourite string soundmaker on the whole.
On the metal side of things I am puzzled by the lack of Crystal Logic! Also perhaps the serrated edge of Destruction’s guitar tone could have made an appearance. Autopsy’s tone is a grave shovel, I love it!
I really need to try to get into the Order from Chaos record again, I tried a couple of years ago and it came highly recommended but to little lasting impact. Perhaps it needs headphones and patience.
I never thought I’d see Fred Giannelli’s name on this site. In my DJ days, I knew of him through his techno alter ego, The Kooky Scientist. I even saw him play once back in the day of hardware live PA’s. I vaguely knew of the association with Psychic TV – looks like I’ll have to learn more about it.
Great post, but like EJ666, I was expecting to see Voivod on the list, along with Primus and Celtic Frost. Completely agree about Godflesh, one of my all time favorites.
I definitely considered FLAMING METAL SYSTEMMM!!! You are dead right about the proper listening conditions for Stillbirth Machine, Helm. Patience and headphones…
Piggy’s guitar playing rules, but to me it always seemed like he kept the tone relatively plain so that all the ideas in his playing would shine through. Outer Limits is my favorite guitar tone from him, I thought briefly about including either Killing Technology or the underrated Voivod Lives album, but hey… now you can rave about Voivod guitar instead!
Cosmo, I’ll send you a couple live PTV tracks when I get home. Always wondered what Giannelli’s other music was like. I love Towards Thee Infinite Beat.
Awesome post… really enjoyed the Bewitched, Dawnbringer, and Anacrusis samples. Perhaps not fitting for this article, but some of Albini’s tone / playing with Big Black is pretty unconventional, unmistakable, and unforgettable. Check out “Bad Penny” and “The Art of Independent Trucking” for proof positive tone… and great songs to boot.
On behalf of all of Hemlock we appreciate the support and compliments. for we held and still individually hold the flag high for the old ways/days.
For people interested, i have several personal copies left of Lust for Fire for sale and you can get it directly from me. Villainsleaze@hotmail.com.
The crazy thing about Steve Austin’s tone is his live setup is simply a Mesa MkIII with two 4×12s and a 1×18 cab, yet he totally nails the range of sounds from their records.
Great article, turned me onto a few bands I didn’t know of. I came to it through the Anacrusis site.
One band I’d like to throw in is Thought Industry. You can’t say they have one great tone because they use so many within one song at the same time that it’s really mind blowing how they managed to make it all so clear and separated. To this day their production still sounds better than everything I’ve ever heard. And who else uses fret-less guitars?
On a quick listen through Outer Space Is Just A Martini Away maybe what I thought was fret-less guitars are just normal guitars with a slide. At any rate check these guys out!!
What a fucking great idea for a post this is, man. I can tell from reading it that you are someone who cares deeply about what you hear on our favourite records – I couldn’t have put the Stillbirth Machine entry into better words than you did – and who analyses their genesis very thoroughly. Hail to you!
Can I weigh in with a couple of points:
Firstly, you’ve surely gotta include Bolt Thrower’s “Realm of Chaos” guitar tone in the “unconventional” list. Refer to the intro of the song “World Eater”. The first extreme metal record I ever got was Earache’s “Grindcrusher” compilation (which is practically a smorgasbord of interesting tones as I’m sure you’d understand). Anyway, Entomded’s “But Life Goes On” was a featured cut and then, a couple of tracks later, came “World Eater”. Now, I put it to you: Can you imagine listening to your first extreme metal record, hearing “But Life Goes On” and naturally having your 17-year-old clueless reality bludgeoned into recognition of what is the heaviest guitar sound EVER; and then, just a few minutes later, Bolt Thrower comes on and makes you question conferring that honour!?! I mean, they’re very different tones and perhaps not comparable, but even so… It’s what I imagine it must have been like for a drummer hearing “Reign in Blood” and then hearing Hate Eternal or something ten years later – except this was five MINUTES later.
Sadly, Bolt Thrower abandoned the sound for later records.
Secondly, and a bit more debatably, what about putting Andy Wallace-era Slayer in the “unconventional” list too? To some people it’s not an unconventional guitar sound at all – by today’s standards it’s practically orthodox; they barely detune – but I do remember alot of people saying that it sounded very thin and dry compared to the other Big Four/et al contemporaries. It does. And yet, especially on South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss, is there any doubt that it absolutely works in the context of stripped-back, unreverberant “vibe” those records had? Desolate, hollow and evil – like the undead version of a standard, “juicier”-sounding thrash metal act.