Metallica’s Load came after a period of intense reflection for the metal icons.

Following years of heavy touring between 1991 and 1993, all members broke off to explore influences outside heavy metal and the music realm, with the dynamic guitar duo of James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett taking a deep dive into hunting (for Hetfield) – and film, jazz, and Asian arts (for Hammett).

When they returned to the band, they took a fresh approach to the instrument. Hammett, who had only handled lead guitar on record up to this point, would now join Hetfield on rhythm duties across the album that would define this new phase of Metallica.

Yet Hammett's transition to rhythm guitarist was never planned. It came about quite naturally.

“It was never really something that we spoke about,” Hammett told Guitar World's Tom Beaujour in a 1996 interview. “The first mention of it came while we were recording the drum tracks.

“When we do that, we all play the songs together in a single room, but the only thing that goes onto the multi-track is the drums – everything else just gets taped. Some of the songs were sounding so good on those tapes that James was like, ‘Well, maybe Kirk should play on the final version of some of these.’”

“Later on, on a day when James happened to be away on a hunting trip, I was laying down a couple of solos, and when I finished the lead on one of the tunes our producer, Bob Rock, said, ‘Okay, tune up, and we'll do the rhythm for this song now.’ I was like, ‘What?’”

As Hetfield adds, “By the time I came back, Kirk had put down rhythm tracks on four songs.”

Hammett specifically went out of his way to come up with a second guitar part that would complement Hetfield’s, and not, as he put it, “ape it”.

“Not that the riffs weren't interesting,” he clarified. “The riffs are the riffs – they're the most important part of the song. Our parts have a really good sense of interplay. And you can actually separate the two guitars and tell who's playing what. James is on the left side, and I'm on the right.”

Was it ever a point of contention that Hammett didn't get to play rhythm guitar up until that point?

“Not really,” he replied. “In fact, on this album we argued more about the solos than anything else. But we're always arguing about something, so it was just par for the course.

“I often have a pretty specific idea of what the solo to a particular song should sound like, so it throws me for a loop when Kirk comes in with something else,” Hetfield added. “But then everyone sits down, we talk it out and work out a middle ground that everyone can be happy with.”

While the album proved controversial among Metallica fans for straying from the band's thrash metal roots – complete with a revamped, leather-jacket-clad look and (gasp) short hair – it was nevertheless a commercial success, topping the charts in more than 15 countries.

The following feature first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Guitar World.

When Guitar World travelled to Milan, Italy, on July 6, to pull together the Big 4 cover shoot with Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, we narrowly managed to corral everyone together for the cover photo.

But due to transportation delays, Metallica six-stringers James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett were unable to participate in the roundtable interview with Slayer's Kerry King, Megadeth's Dave Mustaine and Anthrax's Scott Ian that occurred earlier that day.

When we eventually caught up with Hetfield and Hammett after the show, they treated us to a lively discussion on the legacy of the Big 4, how drummer Lars Ulrich's nervousness helped create the fastest right hands in the business, and why Dave Mustaine should watch his back during the Yankee Stadium Big 4 show.

When I spoke earlier to Kerry King, Dave Mustaine, and Scott Ian, the consensus was clear: they never expected a "Big 4" tour to actually happen.

James Hetfield: We never expected it either!

Kirk Hammett: Definitely not. At a certain point in the Eighties, it was like we were all running neck and neck to see who could outdo each other. For me, that lasted into the Nineties. Then somehow that attitude became less important, and a certain amount of maturity set in. I think when you get older your priorities change. We started to pay more attention to the musical side of things instead of the more superficial side of things.

Hetfield: We've reached 30 years of being a band. We've hit some milestones and we're at a place where we want to celebrate those things instead of running from them. We felt that it was also important to really put this scene on the map. You always hear about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but what about the Bay Area thrash scene and the Big 4? Hopefully these shows will help us make an even deeper mark in history.

James, when I spoke with the other guys, Scott and Kerry said Lars first suggested the Big 4 tour idea, but Dave thought you had. Can you clarify who first had the idea?

Hetfield: I believe it was me. But my memory is pretty horrible, so Lars may claim a few different things. [laughs]

But it doesn't really matter, because it's happened. It probably came out of us talking like, "Hey, let's do a Bay Area show with all the bands we grew up with." Then, "What about the Big 4?" Obviously the business and logistical side of things is Lars' deal, but it doesn't matter. It came from the Metallica camp.

Dave said he had reservations about joining the tour. Mainly, he wanted to make sure all four bands weren't scattered across different stages or interspersed with other acts. Did you feel the same way?

Hetfield: When the idea first came into our minds, we were thinking of it as just the four of us. The first European dates already had bands on them, but they were great festivals and everyone was able to play them. So it was like, "This is a great, established festival and lots of people are gonna show up. Let's get the Big 4 in there." I mean, you can't really just throw off bands that are already booked. But for the later shows, in Indio and this last European run, it was just the Big 4 and possibly one opener.

Hammett: There were certain situations where the promoter had to put more bands on the bill to break even. I understand the economics of the situation. To me it didn't matter; it was just important that all four of us were together on the same bill.

Obviously for a New York native like Scott Ian, playing at Yankee Stadium is huge. Does that venue hold any particular sentiment for you?

Hammett: Nope. [laughs] I had no idea of the significance until Scott called me and was hyperventilating. He was more hoarse than he's ever been, going – [in a rough voice] – "You don't understand! Yankee Stadium!"

Hetfield: I think the obvious connection for us is with [Yankee pitcher Mariano] Mo [Rivera]. For the past 10 years, he's used Enter Sandman as the music that's played before he comes out on the field. He's helped keep that song alive, especially in that stadium.

And even though they're in a new building now [across the street from the location of the original Yankee Stadium, which closed in 2008], it's still great to have that connection. That's actually how we first announced the Big 4 show at Yankee Stadium. During one game, right as the song started, they cut to this video I did where I said, "Stop, stop!" and then announced the show. It was pretty cool.

Dave mentioned that he's turning 50 the day before the Yankee Stadium show. Do you have anything up your sleeves?

Hetfield: [laughs] It'll be great, and Dave better beware. [laughs] I'm not releasing any ideas at this point, but it'll be fun. What better place to celebrate than Yankee Stadium?

The press first applied the Big 4 label to you guys in the Eighties. Back then, did you feel the same solidarity with the other bands as you do now?

Hetfield: No, that definitely developed over time. Back in the Eighties there were thousands and thousands of bands, but there's not too many that have survived 30 years. The Big 4 moniker didn't mean as much then as it does today.

Hammett: Back then, Scott [Ian] and [Anthrax drummer] Charlie [Benante] were the only people I had relationships with. I had no relationship with anyone from Slayer or Megadeth. But over the years that's changed. Now these guys are my peers, and I'm really proud of all our accomplishments.

I also love that, because of the Big 4, there's a bunch of little kids out there now that think Slayer is the shit. And they'll tell their friends, and the legacy will spread even farther. It doesn't start and stop with one band. Until you see all four bands together you won't get a picture about what this is really all about.

In the early days, did you look to the other bands for inspiration when it came to guitar playing?

Hetfield: Oh yeah. There's a huge competitive vein that runs through my body. Competition has always been a very healthy thing for us. At first it started out as basically pure hatred for pop music and "heavy" radio rock. From that hatred it went on to, "Ah, Slayer released that song... We're gonna do this!" And that's still happening onstage at these Big 4 gigs, too. You go out there and see how good they're doing and how well the crowd is reacting to them, and you think, Okay, "I gotta step it up."

Scott was talking about how the four of you basically invented that signature right-hand rhythmic downpicking approach. James, is that something you and Dave developed together during the early days of Metallica?

Hetfield: It's pretty interesting that someone is trying to define the origin of downpicking. It's silly. It's like, who invented music? There's plenty of punk rock bands doing that technique.

The first time I remember seeing an extremely fast right hand was Johnny Ramone, except he was doing a more acoustic-style thing and not muting and punching it like we ended up doing. That was one main inspiration, and the other one was probably the competition between Dave and I. Like, "Here's a riff... Wait, you can't play that. Hahaha!" And then he'd come back with an even faster riff. So at that time the competition was not only between bands but within them, as well.

Hammett: Actually, I'd say Scott Ian is the king of alternate-picking rhythm playing. He can do that like no one else. He's super tight and doesn't get the credit he deserves.

But as far as downpicking goes, I was always aware of it. I remember the first time I heard [Black Sabbath's] Paranoid back in 1978, I thought, "Wow, that guy is picking all downstrokes." Then I heard Symptom of the Universe and thought, "There it is, he's hitting all those downstrokes." Then I heard the Ramones, and there it was again.

When I was in Exodus with Gary Holt, we had some songs that had that early fast downpicking. Back in the early days, a lot of the Bay Area bands were doing it. It was really integrated into that style of playing. So it was nothing new to me.

You guys just kicked it up a notch.

Hammett: Well, that was because of Lars. Back then he was very energetic and way into Motörhead and Diamond Head. So his goal was always to play fast.

But I also think that during those first few years Lars was just nervous. And when he's nervous, his tempos speed up, so I think trying to keep up with Lars' nerves was as big an influence as anything on our fast downpicking technique. [laughs]

Speaking of Gary Holt, he's been sitting in with Slayer while Jeff Hanneman is recovering from his infection. Kirk, what's it like reconnecting with Gary on a tour like this?

Hammett: It is great to finally tour with Gary Holt. We totally rekindled our friendship and started hanging out a lot and speaking the old language we used to speak to each other in high school. It's very cool and one of the best things that came out of these recent Big 4 dates.

Touring back in the early days was filled with a lot of youthful, drunken troublemaking. There's the classic story of Scott Ian and Cliff Burton pissing down laundry chutes in London...

Hetfield: [laughs] Yeah, now it's shitting down laundry chutes. [laughs]. There was certainly some childish behavior that happened on the road. There was a lot of pent-up energy back then. And I can only speak for myself, but now I'm able to channel that energy a lot better and focus it on the music.

But I will say watching my kid piss off the balcony is still pretty funny. I wasn't even the instigator, but the wife still busted me. But she's supposed to. So I have to tell my son, "Hey, don't do that again!" But it was so funny. [laughs]

Hammett: For these Big 4 shows a lot of the guys have their families out with them. So you don't get that crazy debauched rock-and-roll party scene you might have gotten 15 years ago. I hate to say it but now it's all about dealing with the family and being tired from hanging with the family. But take away all the responsibility and it would be one great party scene at every show.

Kerry was saying that the party still follows him pretty closely. James, are you still not drinking?

Hetfield: Yeah, I've got over 10 years [sober], which is great. For me, there's plenty of ways to party without getting hangovers. I'm grateful to have all my days and not feel like crap.

But it doesn't stop anyone around me from doing it. They gotta do what they gotta do. I know there's also a part of me that celebrates being a loner. So when they go out hanging and partying, I'd just rather not do that. People annoy me a lot of the time. [laughs]

The Metallica machine has grown significantly over the years. Ever get nostalgic for piling in a van and hauling your own gear?

Hammett: Heck no. [laughs] I have neck, back, shoulder and knee problems. But I do get nostalgic for the old days, when things were very simple. To play a show nowadays it means you have to alert everyone and crank up the machine. I wish we were a lot more stealthy and quick on our feet. But we're an established band that's been around for a long time. What are you gonna do? We're brontosauruses.

Hetfield: [laughs] Usually we'll hop in some vehicle together, take a little ride and realize that's good enough. There's just so much other stuff in life that is fun for us and inspires us. And you know what? Heading out on tour is still one of those things. It's hard to say goodbye and leave the family, but once you get out there you realize you really crave this guy hang time, whether that's jamming and writing together or just hanging out at HQ. We're all still a bunch of guys that need the guy hang.

The circle is just a lot smaller than it used to be, and the word party means something a little different now. We do get nostalgic about the old days, and what they meant to us. But we're making "old days" right now. Ten years from now we'll look back and wonder why we were wasting our time looking back at the previous 10 years. We're making history now, and enjoying it while we do it.

James, I noticed that you were having a good time on the side of the stage watching Megadeth's set. Is that a regular part of the hang, too?

Hetfield: Oh, definitely. I love to see what's going on if I have time. It's real nice to get up there early and see what's up. It's annoying that I don't get to stand there the whole time and watch the show. But there are a lot of other parts of touring for us, with the fan club, interviews, and actually grabbing a bite of dinner.

It's nice to see how the crowd's reacting, and it's a good sign when the crowd's up for it. Because, really, we want everyone to do well and feel the vibe. And when a crowd is anti one of the Big 4, that's no fun. We're all moving forward in the same direction, so you gotta put that stuff aside. Sure, you might like one band better than the other, but hey, you're seeing some history.

What are your pre-show rituals before hitting the stage for one of these Big 4 shows?

Hammett: I usually try to see a chiropractor, then I do yoga to get centered, and then I sit and do guitar warm-ups. I have all sorts of different exercises that I do, but basically I run through different scales. The process takes a long time, mostly because of the yoga thing. I have to unwind and center myself and make sure my thoughts are grounded.

I find that when I do yoga before going onstage my show is much better, both mentally and physically. It used to be like, "Let's do a shot of vodka and go!" But after a while that stops working. Now it's like, "Let's do a shot of espresso!" [laughs]

Hetfield: The first part of getting the vibe up for me is the meet-and-greet. Such a good vibe is created from talking with people and hearing what songs they want to hear and how music's affected their lives. Whether people are introducing me to their kids, who they've turned on to our music, or I'm meeting a Make-A-Wish kid, there's always something in the meet-and-greet that's very inspirational.

Then there's the regular stuff, like grabbing some grub, stretching, and getting our warrior gear on, which is basically putting on a different black shirt than the one you already had on. Then we go into the tuning room. I'll go through my vocal warm-up tape, which helps me get prepared. Then we go in the jam room and knock some rust off. We all trickle in at different times and find out how each other is doing.

[Bassist] Rob [Trujillo] is always there first. He's a bass player's bass player. He loves to play. Sometimes I'll sit behind the drums and we'll goof around on some tunes. It's always a good vibe and we come out pretty sweaty. Then it's right to the stage.

During the Clint Eastwood tape [Ecstasy of Gold from Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly] we do a little huddle and someone steps up to be the inspirational speaker of the evening [laughs], whether it's telling jokes or memories of the last time we played that city. Dude, we're human and sometimes people need a little help and a push. And when someone's not feeling it, the other guys rally around them.

These Big 4 dates are clearly significant for everyone. Can you recall a specific gig in your early career that was a similar benchmark?

Hetfield: I'd say our first time playing Day on the Green [in 1985 in Oakland, California]. I can't even tell you who else was there, maybe Yngwie Malmsteen and Y&T? All I know is that we were there, [original bassist] Cliff [Burton] was in the band, and it was a big deal, especially for Kirk and Cliff, because it was their hometown show.

Hammett: Definitely. Those Day on the Green shows had been going on since the early Seventies, and I'd seen so many bands play there. One of my all-time-favorite shows that I've ever seen was Day on the Green in 1978. Listen to this bill: AC/DC, Van Halen, Pat Travers, Foreigner, and Aerosmith.

It was so amazing. I remember coming back feeling so inspired that I played my guitar for days. So going from seeing those shows to playing on that stage was amazing. After I found out we were playing it, I was walking on clouds for months. It really felt like we hit a milestone.

Hetfield: Another memorable show was opening for Ozzy [in 1986]. Also playing in Moscow with AC/DC and Pantera [in 1991] after the coup attempt [against the Soviet Union leadership] was unbelievable.

And then there's our second gig ever, which was opening for Saxon. That was definitely a "We've made it" moment... after which we got our $19 pay, hopped back into our Pacer that constantly broke down, and drove home. [laughs]

But these moments are still happening. Playing the Big 4 in Germany was the biggest show we've done in 30 years. It's crazy to think that after 30 years we're still playing before bigger crowds.

Right now, Yankee Stadium is the last scheduled Big 4 show. Are there any plans to add more dates?

Hammett: Well, there's a lot of surf spots I've yet to hit in the world. [laughs] I think we should bring the Big 4 to Indonesia, Tahiti, the Maldives, and Tavarua. [laughs]

But seriously, the vibe at these shows is genuinely good. We'll do a slew of Big 4 shows, go do our own things for a few months, and when we come back everyone is glad to see each other. It's a super-cool thing for us, and I'm sure there are a lot of fans still out there that would love to see the show. I won't say yes, but I won't say no, either.

Hetfield: We don't know what's gonna happen. We're trying to cover the U.S. coasts, at least. Then we gotta get in and start focusing on writing a new record. But more Big 4 shows? We never say never, because obviously, this was never gonna happen in the first place.

Pepper Keenan has looked back on his failed Metallica audition, which took place when he tried out to become Jason Newsted’s replacement back in the early 2000s.

The Corrosion of Conformity guitarist was famously up for the Metallica bass guitar gig, after Newsted left in 2001 following a 14-year stint with the metal legends. He was one of many players in the running, auditioning alongside the likes of Scott Reeder, Eric Avery, Danny Lohner, Jeordie White and more.

It was a rather exposing audition process – Keenan’s jam with the band was filmed and included in the Some Kind of Monster documentary, which charted Metallica’s turbulent period between ’01 and ’03.

He’d been invited to the studio, and although he had a good rapport with James Hetfield and co, Metallica eventually decided it wasn’t a good fit. The gig ultimately went to Robert Trujillo.

Speaking in a new interview with Guitar World, Keenan says he can pinpoint the moment he’d lost the gig – and it happened while they were jamming a new song.

When asked what Metallica would’ve sounded like had he joined the band, Keenan reflects, “I think James Hetfield knows the answer to this, because he would have heard it himself when I was playing with them.

“There was one part in the movie where they made me play bass on a new song,” he continues. “I guess they were trying to stump me with something I’d never heard before… St. Anger or some shit like that. It was a drop-tuned song and I hit the blower knob on my bass and just blasted through.

“They were like ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ It sounded as heavy as lead to me, totally ripping from all the overdrive on my short-scale SG bass set to the front pickup.

“It was some Cream-sounding shit... actually, it sounded more like Fudge Tunnel. I can still see them shaking their heads. I knew I’d lost the gig right there. [laughs]”

He might not have got the bass player spot, but he did get to jam with Metallica – an experience that was filled with plenty of highlights.

Keenan remembers, “Sad But True was fun as shit. I loved Nothing Else Matters as well, plus the older shit like Master of Puppets. But who doesn’t want to play that massive mid-tempo riff from Sad But True? Man, that was right up my alley!”

The Keenan/Metallica link-up had potential. Hetfield knew they were bringing in a guy who, at least on paper, could fit the bill. It just didn’t quite work out.

"[Pepper]'s a good player and a solid guy," Hetfield once told Kerrang! magazine (via Blabbermouth). "I had such high hopes for him. But when it came to jamming with the band, I knew that it wasn't going to work. It just didn't feel right."

Keenan and Hetfield remained close after the audition, having been friends long before. In fact, Keenan once told Guitar World that it was Hetfield who convinced him to switch from Gibson SGs to ESPs.

Les Claypool may be lauded as one of the bass’ undisputed virtuosos and most influential innovators.

However, according to the man himself, this wasn’t enough to earn him a spot in Metallica when he auditioned back in late 1986, following the death of Cliff Burton.

“I didn’t know how popular they were,” Claypool admits in a new interview with The Guardian, explaining he totally misread the room.

“We played a song or two and I said, ‘Hey, you guys want to jam on some Isley Brothers?’ Nobody laughed.”

Claypool was high school classmates with Kirk Hammett but suggests a personality clash was the reason why he never ended up in Metallica. Later, in Behind the Music, James Hetfield diplomatically disagreed, stating: “He was too good.”

In a 2005 Bass Player interview, Claypool spoke more on the experience. “I can't really remember what songs we played, but I didn’t fit in, that was really obvious,” he said.

“I believe Lars said. ‘You're not really used to this kind of music, are you?’ My first response was, goddamn, this is loud!”

As for his response to Hetfield’s reasoning on Behind the Music, Claypool has since scoffed at the suggestion.

“No, it wasn't that – I just didn’t fit in,” he later told Kerrang! “I had a blonde Mohawk and baggy skater pants and two different coloured tennis shoes – and this was back when they had long hair long hair and tight pants.

“I told him he was full of it, and thought I was a freak! That was why he didn't want me! And he [Hetfield] just laughed, because it was true. I wouldn’t have fit. They’re not dumb.”

As it turns out, the rejection set the bassist onto his true path, as the classic Primus lineup of Claypool, Ler LaLonde on guitar and drummer Tim Alexander led to 1989’s Suck On This and 1990’s Frizzle Fry – and their success landed them a major label deal with Interscope in 1991.

Metallica is helping EMG celebrate its 50th anniversary by dropping new special edition finish options for each of their signature pickup sets.

The thrash metal giants have been powered by the firm's high-output passive and active pickups since basically day one. Their relationship predates their 1983 debut album, Kill ‘Em All, with Kirk Hammett first loading three of its single-coils into his purple Fernandes.

Hetfield was quick to follow suit, and EMG founder Rob Turner has recently said that making Hetfield's signature pickups was his most challenging and exhausting build.

And so here, Hetfield's signature JH ‘Het’ humbuckers get a special Sandblasted finish, while Hammett's KH-BB set gets a purple Spectrum colorway, and bass player Robert Trujillo's RT ‘Rip Tide’ pickups get a gilded redressing.

The limited edition sets – which, under the hood, are the same pickups that have been fuelling Metallica’s riffwork over the past few decades – are available during 2026 only.

Hetfield's set, which went through a tireless prototyping process, is unique in its use of ceramic poles, which are taller and thinner than usual. Hammett's Bone Breakers, by comparison, utilize Alnico 5 magnets, while Trujillo's take on the EMG J bass pickups are now “truly metal” thanks to their fresh new look.

“The thing I love about EMGs is that they're so consistent,” Hetfield says. “I can put EMGs in every guitar, and it's gonna sound exactly like I need it to.”

In other Metallica news, the band has just announced a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, and their existing gig rig means they won’t need to go to the lengths John Mayer did to work around the venue’s sound restrictions.

Billy Corgan doesn’t often get a chance to talk guitar tone. But capturing that elusive sound in his head has driven him throughout his career. He’s spent his life in pursuit of it. “I don’t know if I ever have found my sound,” he says. “That’s the funny part. I’m always chasing something.”

The Smashing Pumpkins leader has never suffered fools and never been afraid to speak his mind. Accordingly, we’ve heard plenty about the band’s ’90s heyday and the interpersonal dramas that ensued. When I mention that I sent off an audition for the band, Corgan laughs. “Oh, wow. You might have dodged a bullet there!”

His quest for tonal refinement is as much a part of the Pumpkins story as the combative studio sessions and era-defining songwriting. It was Corgan’s discovery of the op amp Big Muff that propelled Siamese Dream to new high-gain planes. The explosive riffs of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness were shaped by his tireless preamp and power amp matching, tube swapping, Lace Sensor pickup switching.

And he hasn’t stopped – not just to satisfy his own desires, but also to be part of the changing face of guitars in modern rock.

“The midrange became the focus for guitar music in the 21st century,” he says. “I grew up listening to Hetfield and the scooped tone, and I love that sound. But listen to Metallica’s 2025 guitar sound. The scoop is gone. I don’t love a lot of midrange on guitar, but I’ve had to adjust my ear to make it happen.”

Which brings us to the Supergrace, his pedal amp with British veterans Laney. The two-channel 60W amp in a stompbox was born from his desire to revamp the company’s ubiquitous Supergroup for the 21st century. He suggested they link up with Brian Carstens, builder of Corgan’s signature Grace head, and possessor of “a savant-level understanding of gain and power.”

The resultant Supergrace delivers precision-engineered high-gain sounds alongside woodier vintage tones, essentially bottling Corgan’s live tone in one pedal. He was so confident in the sound that its first road test was in front of 60,000 people in a headline-grabbing guest spot with My Chemical Romance.

“With My Chem, they’re all playing modelers, and they sound great. Having a full rig was complicated. I think that extols the virtue of the pedal.”

This could be just the beginning of a signature relationship with Laney. There’s talk of full-blown tube head collaborations with Carstens down the line. It’s a passion point for the guitarist, who hails the legacy of the family-run company.

“As someone who grew up listening to and being so inspired by this amp, and the man who played it, Tony Iommi, is there anything I can do out of loyalty to help them?”

Testament to his commitment to the brand, Corgan is very giving with his time. We discuss the changing role of tone in rock music, his memories of Ozzy Osbourne’s final show, and why he’s the most excited to make a guitar record in decades.

Like your Reverend and Fender signature guitars, the Supergrace is reasonably priced. Why is making gear affordable to guitar players important to you?

Pretty simple: the guitar that changed my life. I walked into a Guitar Center one day and off the wall I bought an Eric Clapton model ’57 reissue Strat with Lace Sensor pickups. It was affordable enough for me as a touring musician, and that became the main guitar for Siamese and Mellon Collie, and launched 1,000 ships of people chasing that sound.

[Editor’s note: The Lace Sensor pickups on that guitar, which became known as the Bat Strat, were not stock on ’57 reissues of the day. It may have been pre-modded in store. As Corgan recalls, Guitar Center was using Clapton, who used Lace Sensors at the time, to promote the model.]

I didn’t go out and buy some $4,500 boutique guitar. I bought a production-model guitar, and it became super-valuable in my life. So every time I work with a guitar or amp manufacturer, I always say the same thing: I don’t want this to be out of the price range of anybody.

And in that spirit, the Reverends I play on stage are all production models. I don’t have a special one only for Billy – you know, special neck, special pickup – nothing. They are literally off-the-wall Reverends.

You’ve been meticulous about your tone over the years, and it shows. Can you remember the moment you felt you’d found your sound?

The first revelatory moment was when Jimmy Chamberlin sold me what became known as the Gish Strat, the one that was stolen and later returned. And it wasn’t until I played a Strat through a Marshall that I thought, “Okay, I’m in the neighborhood.” That was the first time I thought, “The way I play, expressed through this instrument and this amp, is close to what I’m chasing – what I want to feel like when I play.”

But as soon as I got there, because I was using a JCM800, there was not enough gain. And that started this whole other thing that led to multiple gain stages and jacking the signal in through the low input and KT88 tubes, and this cabinet and this wiring, and anything to just get more gain, including using shorter cabling.

How important is tone when it comes to guitar playing?

The most important thing with any guitar player is how they attack the guitar, physically. Tony Iommi’s attack vector on a guitar is far different than, say, Eddie Van Halen’s or Brian May’s, but that’s what makes them them. Only they play like that. You can imitate, but you’re never going to replicate.

And then tone: even Eddie went from that “brown sound,” that Marshall Plexi. When I was in 5150 I asked him about it, and there in the corner was the amp. There was the amp I spent thousands of hours in my bedroom trying to replicate – not realizing I’m not Eddie Van Halen! It’s never going to work.

But even he had to update his sound. And every time he would do a new amp collab, it got more modern in terms of gain. I was recently watching a YouTube clip of when Van Halen last toured Japan. I saw some fan was complaining about the sound, saying it’s not what it used to be.

And I thought, “Yes, but I don’t think you understand that Ed was under the same pressure we all were, which is, ‘I can play my old shit, but it sounds old.’

You get put in this weird spot where somebody might sound more exciting with tone, even though you’re a better guitar player. And I think that’s always been the case. Clapton used line drivers. Ritchie Blackmore used line drivers. Tony did. They had to brighten up those dark British amps.

Last time I saw the Pumpkins, I was struck by the fact you were using more modulation on your guitar leads. Does that play into your tonal evolution?

Well, I like the way things animate against each other. I can’t say I love it. I just don’t have a better solution to get that movement behind the notes, especially for lead playing. I don’t play that many leads live anymore, so if I’m only going to play two or three leads live, I’ve got to make my point fairly quickly.

I’m 58 years old, and the kineticism of a lead is what I’m interested in. The notes are less important to me. And that might sound strange, but that’s just the way I feel.

In essence, if you’re going to play a lead in an alternative rock band in 2026, what are you trying to say? No-one’s going to care that you can play good, because there are 50 10-year-olds playing Eruption on YouTube.

There’s nothing actually that impressive about somebody being able to play the guitar at a decently high level anymore. So I think it’s the expressive quality that makes it interesting. I’m more interested in creating a feeling than showing off.

We’re talking about Laney, founded in Birmingham, where Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell show took place. What did it mean to you to perform at that show?

It was honestly one of the greatest experiences I’ve had. The music, and being there in support of the band and Ozzy, meant a lot to me as a fan and as somebody who knows the Osbournes a bit personally.

I think it’ll go down as one of the great days in rock history. Just to be part of that lineup was insane, but it was that incredible moment where so many people pulled together in a common cause to celebrate the band and Oz, and everybody was so graceful about it, the vibe, the performances, the generosity.

I noticed when you got up with your fellow Chicago “metal Yardbirds”, Adam Jones and Tom Morello, you didn’t play guitar. Why not?

[Laughs] Well, originally I was going to play guitar, and then Tom wrote me and said, “Are you cool with us having K.K. up?” And I was like, “I’m getting out of the way on that one!”

I’m a huge K.K. Downing fan. In fact, I own his old number one amp and his pedalboard from the ’70s and ’80s. He put them up for auction. I saw him play that amp and that pedalboard and that V at a racetrack here in Chicago in 1982 when they were on the Screaming for Vengeance tour.

I’m not sure K.K. knows who I am at this point. I tried to talk to him about the gear, and he seemed a bit bewildered, like, “Who’s the fan that wandered in off the street?” But to stand there in Birmingham and play, not only with that great lineup on stage, but also with K.K.

It was deafening on stage. I do prize my hearing, but when he was soloing during Snowblind, I went out of my way to stand in front of that cabinet to just listen to pure K.K. with the wah and the V. And it was like an out-of-body experience.

We’ve spoken about keeping up with guitar trends. When Kiki Wong joined Smashing Pumpkins, you said you were already familiar with her on Instagram. Are there any other social media guitarists you’re a fan of?

I burned out on it, I think. And I don’t mean this as criticism – there are some unbelievable guitar players on social media. Where I get a little lost is I don’t see where a lot of that great playing is converting into popular music, whether it’s in popular metal bands or popular alternative rock bands.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are guitar players that I wouldn’t know that got super-popular on Instagram and now they’re in the biggest metal band in Finland or something.

I guess I’m old-school. I want to see those people on stage. I want to see them making the Metallica songs of tomorrow, or Megadeth or Slayer or something. I want to see that crowd of guitar players convert those incredible abilities into the popular culture.

What if Clapton had just been a guitar influencer and hadn’t been in John Mayall and Cream and Derek and the Dominos? The reason everybody knows Eric Clapton’s name is not because he’s a great guitar player. It’s because he made some of the most popular music of the 20th century – and, oh, by the way, it has incredible guitar.

The last Smashing Pumpkins record, Aghori Mhori Mei, had a great reception. Do you see yourself continuing down a heavier path on your next release?

I’m working on music, and I’m very focused on guitar music. It’s the most motivated I have been to make a guitar record in 20-25 years. Part of that is shoegaze music has really come back in the culture, which we’re commonly associated with.

There came a point in the mid-2000s where it seemed like guitar was totally out of vogue. I’m not a Luddite – if people are not interested in guitar, that’s cool by me, and I’ll try to come at it a different way. But guitar is the thing I understand the most, and where I’ve had the most influence.

So I’m excited to once more dive into the sea of pedals and amps and guitars and see if I can come up with something new to say. And I think, in a good way, the bar is very high right now.

There’s a lot of very interesting guitar bands coming on the scene, and they’re saying lots of new things. Some are familiar – I think, “Well, you’ve definitely listened to me and Swervedriver,” but that’s cool, because we stole from everybody.

It’s just that young people are listening to guitar music, and the young guitar players of today have something new to say. It inspires me to get back on the horse one more time.

What will you change about your playing and your sounds to say something new with the instrument?

That’s a really good question, because I just did the operatic interpretation of Mellon Collie in Chicago at the Lyric Opera. And a lot of the parts that the orchestra was playing were the guitar parts, and they translated quite beautifully. In the band – and I’m not making this up – we used to call it orchestral arranging.

We would look at the wall of guitars as if, “This is the oboe and this is the violin.” So, I’m inspired to go back and once more operatically arrange the way I hear the music, and then use new technology and new approaches to guitar to achieve the polyphony that I would be interested in.

Mellon Collie was the peak of a lot of years of experimentation. But we also made that album thinking, “OK, that’s the end of this. There’s no chapter beyond this. We’ve taken this as far as we can go.” Hence, 46 guitars on Thru the Eyes of Ruby, Jelly Belly – all those crazy overdubs.

So I would like to come at it now down the road, because if Mellon Collie was the summit, Machina [/The Machines of God] was the deconstruction of that approach.

I haven’t really done that Siamese guitar stacking since Oceania in 2012. But I did it knowing I wasn’t that into it. It was like, “I’m getting all this pressure to do this again.” So rather than run away from it or shut my ears, I’ll approach it from the standpoint of, “I’m not sure I have anything new to say, but I’ll try.”

How has your relationship with the guitar changed from the ’90s to now?

I’ve always been fairly rewarded for my guitar playing. But it was not the main thrust of my thing. And I think this is the reason a lot of the guitar magazines went off me in the 2000s – because I was being critical of the guitar. I wasn’t doing like, “The guitar is great and I love my guitar.” I was actually saying something more artistic, which is: “Look, the guitar needs to innovate.”

The guitar needs to be moved forward in terms of technical and mechanical innovation. If you look at the major companies, the Fenders and the Gibsons, they’re basically running museums half the time; their main focus is not innovation. This is why I’m in a relationship with Reverend, because the focus is innovation.

I used to write guitar advice columns for Guitar World. I was totally in that community, and then they just booted me out, because I wasn’t saying the right kind of political things anymore. And what’s even weirder is because of that, those 15-20 years where I wasn’t part of “guitar world,” a lot of young guitar players don’t even know I’m the one playing the guitar! They think it’s James [Iha], because they assume I’m the singer and James is the guitar player.

So even just getting back into the conversation about guitars is a relatively recent thing, and obviously part of it is me making guitar music again. But also I think it’s just I’ve always come at it from a different perspective.

By the time I was 17/18, I could play lightning-fast. And for whatever reason, I just hit the wall. I focused more on innovation and bringing something new to the table, and getting out of the gunslinger wars, and realizing I was never going to be better than Steve Vai or Zakk Wylde – and that was OK.

I feel like I’ve come full circle, where people now understand what I did, what I’ve actually contributed, and I don’t need to play any game about it. I can talk about what I love: the guitar. And I think you can see my passion for the instrument.

• The Laney Supergrace Loudpedal is out now. Head to Laney for more info.

A 10-year-old guitarist has shared the life-changing moment he met Metallica's down-picking extraordinaire, James Hetfield, who signed his guitar and offered some important advice to the young prodigy.

The pre-teen shredder, Jacob K, has amassed several thousand followers on Instagram thanks to his Metallica-propelled busking videos. Last summer, he got to meet the man responsible for his favorite riffs, and his reaction was nothing short of heartwarming.

The meeting took place in Tampa in June 2025, with the band in town as part of their M72 world tour – one Hetfield had nightmares about before on the eve of the run. In the clip, Hetfield can be heard asking, “Is this yours?” of the white-and-black ESP LTD Iron Cross SW, before scrawling his signature on it.

Jacob had attended a pop-up store the day after the concert, when Hetfield flipped his world upside down.

“Met my favorite person,” he writes on Instagram. “The best musician/guitarist and the reason I play guitar. He was so amazing, cool, and so kind to me. It was the best day ever. I will never forget it.”

Jacob was set to be in attendance for night two of the band’s Tampa trip, with his parents reflecting on what the meet-up meant to their son.

“What meant the most wasn’t just meeting the GOAT. It was how humble, kind, and genuine James was with our son,” they write. “He stopped. He talked with him. He encouraged him. He told him to keep playing and never stop.

“Up until that moment, Jacob’s world was countless hours of watching interviews, concerts, performances, learning Metallica riffs, and listening daily. This wasn’t just meeting an idol, it was meeting the person who inspired it all.

“As parents, watching that brief moment of kindness changed us, too. Seeing a legend take time for a kid who looks up to him so deeply is something we’ll never forget. Talent is incredible, but character is everything. He’s the real deal. Forever grateful. Forever inspired.”

Indeed, as Yungblud once said, “you ain't ever gonna see James Hetfield slag off a young rock star.”

The accompanying video clip was originally filmed for personal use, with the family then opting to share it on social media to showcase Hetfield’s humility, and what was a truly ‘pinch-me’ moment for the young guitarist.

In related news, Gorjia's Joe Duplantier has revealed Hetfield introduced him to ESP guitars, resulting in a killer signature offset after leaving Charvel.

As Dave Mustaine gears up for his and Megadeth’s final album, questions remain about why the relationship between Mustaine – a former Metallica guitarist – and James Hetfield remains strained to this day.

Turns out, one of the core reasons goes back to the early days of Metallica. While the band has reissued every studio album – from Kill 'Em All through to Load – their early and now legendary No Life 'Til Leather demo, which includes key Mustaine contributions, has notably been omitted.

“I wrote all the music on Phantom Lord, all the music on Metal Militia, all the music on Jump In The Fire and The Mechanix,” Mustaine asserts in an new interview with Classic Rock.

“And I wrote the lyrics for Jump In The Fire and The Mechanix. So do the math: if I wrote the music and James [Hetfield] wrote the lyrics, then the credit is 50 per cent me, and 50 per cent James. Well, that's not what went down when I left. James and Lars figured out that they were going to give Lars some percentage of the songs he didn't write anything on, and that happened on all four songs.”

Mustaine reveals that writing credits were a “bone of contention” for him going forward with Metallica on anything.

He adds, “It just wasn't fair. You guys got more money than God, why do you have to take my money?”

Speaking about the reissue that never happened, Mustaine reveals, “So James called me up, ‘Hey, man, we want to release this No Life 'Til Leather thing, and we want to get all this publishing stuff straight, and, you know, we really don't remember what went down.

“I said, ‘Well, that's good, because I do. I remember what went down, and I can help with that.’

“And then the conversation took a turn,” he continues. “James goes, ‘Well, that's not the way that we remember it.’ And I went, ‘Well, James, honestly, there's three ways to look at this: there's your way, my way, and the truth, which is some combination of the two.’

“That was the end of the conversation. He took offense to that, and we hung up, and I don't remember speaking to him since then.”

Ahead of the band’s final album and tour, Mustaine sat down with Guitar World to recount the hiring and firing of every Megadeth guitarist.

What is it?

The image of James Hetfield donning his all-white Explorer, carved with the words ‘So what’, is an iconic one in metal history. Despite this, there’s never actually been an official Gibson Explorer made bearing Papa Het’s moniker, and that remains the case with this Epiphone Explorer 80s EMG. Some may feel this is a Hetfield Explorer in all but name, however, Hetfield is not a Gibson signature artist like his bandmate Kirk Hammett. This is more of a firm nod fans will very much appreciate. Myself included.

Hetfield originally began playing a white Electra Flying Wedge, which was sold to him as a Gibson Flying V. After the neck of that guitar snapped in 1984, he then switched to a white Gibson Explorer, which had no pickguard and a three-knob control layout, now commonly referred to as an 83 or 84 Explorer, depending on who you ask.

This was the model largely used to record Metallica's second album, Ride The Lightning and was a favorite of Hetfield’s until he got his ESP endorsement in 1987. It was equipped with Gibson Dirty Fingers humbuckers.

The Explorer 80s EMG is not to be confused with the Epiphone 1984 Explorer EX, which gained massive popularity and value on the used market when Epiphone pulled it around 2019. This updated model is much closer to the form factor of Hetfield's original guitar, sans any lewd graffiti.

It features a rosewood fingerboard and all mahogany body and neck construction with the usual set neck, and a SlimTaper 60s neck profile. Mini die-cast tuners adorn a hockey stick-style headstock with a LockTone tune-o-matic bridge with LockTone stop bar at the opposing end.

The control layout is different from your typical Explorer guitar, giving you a master volume for each pickup and a single master tone knob. The 3-way pickup selector is also next to the tone knobs, whereas typically on Explorers it’s located at the upper bout, giving you control over a pair of EMG 81/60s humbuckers.

Priced at $899, it’s potentially great value for a guitar that’s essentially a James Hetfield signature in all but name. If it delivers the goods…

Specs

• Launch price: $899 | £849 | €1,099
• Made: China
• Type: Six-string electric guitar
• Body: Mahogany
• Neck: Mahogany
• Fingerboard: Rosewood
• Scale length: 24.75” / 628.65mm
• Nut/width: Graph Tech / 1.69” (43mm)
• Frets: 22
• Hardware: Mini die-cast tuners, LockTone tune-o-matic bridge with LockTone stop bar
• String spacing at bridge: 51.2mm
• Electrics: EMG 60 (10k), EMG 81 (10k), 2 volume, master tone
• Weight: 4.7kg
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Classic White
• Cases: Epiphone premium soft case
• Contact: Epiphone

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

Taking the Explorer 80s EMG out of the Epiphone premium softcase, it’s a nice weight at just shy of 5kg. It’s solid feeling but not overly heavy to my arm, and although the Classic White finish isn’t quite as yellow as Hetfield’s original guitar (which is fair enough considering this is not a signature model), there are no immediately obvious blemishes or bits of dirt in it.

I do spot a very faint crack in the finish where the cutaway meets the neck, which is a common issue with Explorer-style guitars and others with set necks. It’s absolutely tiny though, and you’d be hard-pressed to spot it unless you were going over it with a fine toothcomb like I did. One of the volume knobs is sitting slightly higher than the others, but a firm push down sorts that out.

Flipping the guitar around, I open up the battery compartment and can spot nothing awry here. It’s a very close fit for the 9V battery, with a small, blue piece of fabric that wraps around it so you can easily pull it out when the time comes to change it. When buying the guitar new, it won’t come with a battery already installed, so you’ll need to use one of your own or purchase a fresh one; otherwise you won’t get any sound out of the guitar.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★½

Excitedly sitting down with it to start immediately downpicking palm muted power chord riffs, it feels absolutely huge on my lap compared to my usual Telecaster. It’s pleasingly balanced on my knee though, and I don’t feel like I have to fight to keep it upright. On my guitar strap there's no neck dive, which can plague this particular guitar shape. It balances nicely when I take both hands off and let it hang, which I wasn’t expecting.

The '60s Slim Taper neck still feels quite chunky in my hand, certainly not what you’d expect to find on any shred guitar, but I don’t mind it at all. The 24.75” scale makes it feel decidedly quick in hand though, with no time passing before I’m renditioning James’ solo part from Master of Puppets.

The profile gives me a nice bit of chunk to dig in with, which gives me plenty of confidence running pentatonic licks wherever I am on the fretboard. The bridge is positioned quite close to the neck side of the body, which keeps my picking hand out of the way of the large horn on the lower bout.

One thing I do notice is that when I try to go for that 22-fret bend at the end of Kirk’s solo section from Master of Puppets, my hand hits the cutaway of the guitar. It’s actually pretty awkward to get to, and I end up having to adjust the angle of my fretting hand to reach over further when going for it. That said, every other note can be accessed without doing this.

Tuning stability feels rock solid once it’s settled, and despite abusing it with some hefty bends, I find I seldom have to retune after the first half an hour or so. I do find the stock 10-46 strings are a bit light for my heavy-handed playing style, and I can imagine a lot of metal players would swap these for something a bit heavier that you can dig into. I used it to track in the studio, and it held up take after take, which is certainly reassuring.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★☆

Plugging the Explorer into a Neural DSP Quad Cortex, I feel obliged to start with a JCM800 model, and boy does it sound good! The EMG active humbuckers – the classic Hetfield preference of a standard 81 model in the bridge and 60 in the neck before they were refined further with his signature set – are an iconic metal tone, and their surgical precision is perfect for chugging power chords. I find there’s a much lighter touch required than the passive pickups I’m used to, and the sustain is absolutely incredible.

Adding some delay and a Tube Screamer-style overdrive pedal model to the signal path, and I’m in lead guitar heaven, with the precise, cutting tone of the pickups making scale runs and legato feel like an absolute breeze. I feel immediately able to speed my way through a variety of metal classics, and there’s something very satisfying about chugging on an open E power chord here.

There’s a downside to the precise nature of the pickups though, as when I switch to a Fender Twin model, the clinical nature of the EMGs makes them feel very inorganic. The decreased dynamic range makes things like arpeggios of open chords quite nice, as everything is very even with the naturally compressed tone, but when trying to play more dynamic pieces, I find there’s a lack of subtlety with them.

Verdict

For James Hetfield fans, this guitar is a no-brainer. It delivers the look, playability, and all for a very good price. Whether you want to carve your own lewd slogans into it or just pick up a distinctive-looking guitar for rocking out on the stage, it’s a great choice for players of classic metal. It does a great job for more modern styles, and for the live guitar player, you’ll certainly stand out on stage with this bad boy strapped on.

It’s a large guitar however, it doesn’t sit in a traditional guitar stand, and I can appreciate that not everyone will love the nonconformist looks of it. The EMG pickups also limit it to being a metal guitar, so don’t expect to be playing dynamic blues licks or jazz. If you’re all about precision metal tones though, you can’t go wrong with such iconic humbuckers.

Guitar World verdict: If you want a guitar to play all kinds of heavy music, the Epiphone Explorer 80s EMG is one that will let you do it with aplomb. From the eye-catching looks to the super playable neck, it’s a great guitar for laying down precision metal rhythms and searing lead licks. It’s not subtle, but it’s not trying to be.

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Hands-on demos

Guitar Guitar

System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian has reflected on his brief stint deputizing for James Hetfield in Metallica – which began after he saved one of the band's shows at the last minute.

In 2000, Malakian’s nu-metallers were the new the kids on the block. They only had one album and a few commendable Ozzfest showings to their name at that point, but they were making serious waves.

So, when James Hetfield was sidelined after a water skiing accident, Malakian was promptly sworn into the band. He and some ad hoc vocalists helped fill the void left by the band’s co-founder across a handful of shows, after Malakian put himself in the frame.

“When I was 12 or 13, I had been playing the guitar for a year. I was with these guys in my school and, in their dad's garage, we would play Metallica covers,” he says on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast (via Blabbermouth).

“That's pretty much all we'd play,” he adds. “[It was] a big part of how I learned how to play the guitar, so I knew all the Metallica covers.”

Aside from Malakian’s in-depth knowledge of the material, his hiring was also practical as System of a Down were supporting Metallica on their Stadium Sanitarium tour that summer. But there was no time for a bedding-in process.

"I met Metallica on stage playing with them,” he reveals. “I never met them before. We're the first band. Nobody knows us. It was like, five bands on the bill [including Kid Rock and Korn].

“Jason Newsted was singing, and then they brought [Jonathan Davis from] Korn on, and they played this Cheech & Chong cover song or something. They didn't know what to do because James [Hetfield] wasn't there.

“So I turned to my tech, and I say, ‘Go tell their tech that I know a lot of their shit.’ Then my tech comes back to me. He's, like, ‘All right, come with me.’

“Next thing you know, I go on the other side of the stage. I get handed a Les Paul – I think it was one of Kirk Hammett's. I'm in my after-show [clothes], wearing Lakers sweats. I'm not even ready to get on stage.”

But on stage he went, in front of 60,000 people, many of whom may not have caught SOAD’s set.

“You gotta understand that [at the time] our band's not big yet. I'm still a kid. I'm 22 years old,” Malakian continues. “I can't even believe that we're even allowed to open up for Metallica, and they put me out there! They're, like, ‘What do you know?’ I go, ‘I don't know; Master Of Puppets,' ‘Okay. Count it in.’

“And then there's this thing that happened where, in the middle of Master Of Puppets, instead of going into that slow part, they went into Welcome Home (Sanitarium), and I didn't know they were gonna do that. You would think we rehearsed it – I didn't even know it was gonna happen.”

Malakian clearly made a good impression. He continues, “Next thing you know, Kirk Hammett's in front of me with a guitar trying to teach me stuff off Load, and they're like, ‘Hey, get your shit from your bus, because you're flying on the private jet with us now.’”

After a few shows, Hetfield was back in the saddle, while Malakian was left with lifelong memories.

In related news, Malakian stumbled across a SOAD cover band while on tour last year and proceeded to play with them.

A typical show by Cali hardcore crew DRAIN plays out like a greatest hits of early ’90s metal music videos, with bodies flying off the stage into a circle pit churning with moshers and slam dancers.

But while the crushing tones coming from Cody Chavez’s stable of Jackson guitars may fit the time when hardcore punk and thrash first met, he isn’t stuck in a bygone era – or even the genre itself. In fact, the rhythmically-inclined riffer, who started out playing drums, was a hip-hop head before discovering Kiss.

“I remember seeing Ace Frehley bending backwards doing a solo, and I was just like, ‘Whoa!’” Chavez says. “That’s when it clicked with me. I was like, ‘I wanna be a rock guy now!’”

On DRAIN’s latest album, …IS YOUR FRIEND, his metronomic instincts shine – a rock-solid picking hand maintains a tightly wound, militaristic chug on songs such as Nights Like These, evoking comparisons to all-timers like James Hetfield, who he’s long respected.

“I watched videos of James playing during the …And Justice For All era and I just mimicked that,” Chavez recalls. “I feel like it kind of hindered me at first, because I’d downpick everything, and obviously you can only go so fast. But over the years I’ve found a balance between alternate picking and downpicking.”

He puts that into action on Darkest Days, which builds from a stomping groove into a full-on thrasher. “I was thinking, ‘What would 19, 20-year-old Cody mosh to?’ I’m sitting with my eyes closed, imagining myself in a VFW hall or something, and I just imagined that beat and riff.”

The squeals, screams and dive-bombing licks throughout the 10-song record channel his inner Ace, not to mention Dimebag Darrell. Armed with his white Jackson MJ Series Dinky – he used a Jackson Virtuoso on the riffs – plus Peavey Butcher and Diezel amps, Chavez has all his tricks on display.

The new album distills everything people love about DRAIN, but there’s progression in the songwriting and playing. What was the feeling as you were working on it?

We really threw all our personalities and influences into a melting pot. Not that we haven't been down for that before, but I feel like we really honed in on it this time. And I feel like we’re a lot more mature now.

When we wrote California Cursed [2020], me and Sammy Ciaramitaro were like 20 and Tim Flegal was a little older. Now we’ve been a band for a while – we’ve been on so many tours in vans and buses together. I view this as a more mature body of work.

Your riffs recall elements of crossover thrash and skate punk, but you’re pulling from a broader slate of influences. What else inspires you on guitar?

Life experiences in general, like seeing what Mike Shaw does in Mindforce and what Dennis Vichidvongsa does in Speed. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kiss since Ace passed, going down memory lane.

On DRAIN’s earlier songs you shied away from solos, but they've become more integrated now. Are you shaking off some hardcore purism?

I wouldn’t say that. When I was a kid I’d see guitarists soloing and think, “I could never do that – I’m just gonna stick to playing rhythm.” But in reality, if you practice hard enough you can play like that. I’ve surprised myself over the years by how much I’ve improved in that area. I’m pretty excited to get more of that in these new songs.

Who are your biggest lead inspirations? There’s Dime and Zakk in all the pinch harmonics.

I love Dime and I love Zakk Wylde, especially the stuff he did with Ozzy. And I love a lot of the early Black Label Society stuff. But my favorite guitarist of all time is Dimebag for sure. When I got into Pantera as a kid, he really stood out to me.

I love Regular People off Vulgar Display of Power. My favorite album is Cowboys From Hell – Heresy is undeniable. It starts off with the harmonics and as a kid I was like, “What even is that?” It was all the little stuff that was different from your average thrash or hardcore band. It had so much character.

And then obviously The Art of Shredding is such an incredible riff. But for my favorite solo I’d probably say Live in a Hole from Vulgar – the way it goes into the groove part first is so cool.

What goes into composing a solo for DRAIN?

For this album, we’d have the demos on our phones, then I’d come back home after practice and play them over a little JBL speaker and sit there with my guitar. I’d have an idea of what I want but then I’d think, “I could switch this part up.” It’s about sitting there and figuring out what works best and what sounds the best to my ears.

The solo on Who’s Having Fun matches the vocal melody; I like little stuff like that. My goal on Until Next Time was to sound like Dokken – a glam-metal sound, but something hardcore kids can still dance to.

So for the solo, I don’t wanna say I stole, but I was inspired by George Lynch on the Dokken song Into the Fire. You can hear there are some similar notes, but it’s more the way he plays. I took that energy for our song.

• …IS YOUR FRIEND is out now.

EMG pickups founder Rob Turner has said that working with James Hetfield forced the firm to completely reinvent its methodology as the Metallica guitarist pushed its craft to the limit.

The thrash icons are one of the most notable bands to have adopted EMGs, and helped define their status as heavy metal pickups.

“Kirk [Hammett] was the first one to call up, but I had no idea who he was,” Turner says during a talk with Thomann at Guitar Summit 2025. “I don't think he knew who he was, actually. He was in a band and they were trying to get a record deal, and he had this purple Stratocaster with two single-coils and a humbucker in it.”

That first encounter between EMG and Metallica predated their debut album, Kill ‘Em All, which shows how integral the EMG’s high-output active pickups have been to their world-conquering sound across their entire discography.

“I think James [Hetfield] got a little jealous of what was going on,” Turner adds with a smile.

Before long, the guitarists worked with EMG on their own pickups, and some years later Hetfield’s exacting ways put Turner through the ringer.

“Hetfield was the toughest [to voice a pickup for],” he says. “We built 19 different models. He more or less changed what we were doing. Normally, we use a very narrow core in the pickup, and he wanted to have pole pieces.”

This created a domino effect of challenges, which forced Turner to rethink his approach.

“So then we're going to start with a larger core and a larger coil. That means [having] a larger aperture, which means there's going to be too much low-end,” Turner explains. “So then it's like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to change the dimensions of the coil. They need to be taller and thinner. We need to be able to space them accordingly.’

“The hardest one was the neck pickup,” he adds, “because it uses ceramic poles. Typically, nobody does that. They're too strong. So, we had to magnetize them to a certain extent.

“Then we showed him a tray of sample finishes, and he picked the hardest one to do, which is this black, shiny, stealth-like, and it's the hardest thing to prevent from getting scratches in production.”

Hetfield's official signature 'Het Set' ultimately reshaped what were, at their core, EMG and EMG81 humbuckers. In the firm’s promotion material for the set, Hetfield is quoted as wanting “something unique and historic.” He certainly got that.

In related news, Dave Mustaine has revealed that Megadeth will close out their last-ever album with a cover of Ride the Lightning, a song he co-wrote with Hetfield before he left Metallica.

James Hetfield might just have won Halloween 2025 for Metallica, having ripped through thrash classic For Whom The Bell Tolls dressed as a kangaroo.

Metallica's set at Optus Stadium, Perth, on October 31st saw half the band get into the spooky spirit early on in their performance, surprising fans at the 70,000 capacity venue.

Hetfield the Kangaroo, with a spring in his step, was joined by bass player Robert Trujillo in a hi-vis vest and builder's helmet. The items were likely cobbled together from crew members backstage, but he gets marks for trying. Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich’s casual attire, though, didn't quite nail the brief.

“Let’s hop to it!” Metallica posted on Instagram, accompanied by footage of the Ride The Lightning cut. Hetfield’s vocals are a little muffled by the costume, but, playing an Electra Guitars 2236 Flying Wedge inscribed with the band's Scary Guy logo, he handled its guitar parts with aplomb. He’s set a high bar for next year.

The guitar is a cheap Japanese copy of the Gibson Flying V, and the original featured on their debut album, Kill 'Em All. Speaking to Ultimate Guitar in 2023, the band's guitar tech Chad Zaemisch revealed that he and luthier Bill Nash had recently been tasked with tracking down several of these guitars and modifying them to recreate the tonal magic of the band's early days.

He also revealed that the original V was dusted off and put back into circulation around this time, so the one Hetfield is playing here could be the one that was such a key part of the band's formative years.

In related news, Kirk Hammett's mystery Back to the Beginning SG is headed to auction, along with more than 150 guitars from his personal collection. He'd used the Custom Shop Gibson SG to cover Black Sabbath's Hole in the Sky during the historic event.

In more recent Metallica-related news, Dave Mustaine has revealed that the last song on Megadeth's forthcoming final album will be a reimagining of Ride the Lightning, a song he helped write before leaving the band in 1983.

Dave Mustaine has revealed he has some unfinished business with Metallica. When Megadeth release their final studio album in January 2026, the eponymous thrasher will sign off with a ripping cover of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning.

And Mustaine promises that the mid-paced, headbanging title-track from Metallica’s sophomore album will be performed as you will never have heard it before.

The question is why? In a YouTube video, Mustaine explains everything. In short, it’s a tribute. He wants to “close the circle” before riding off into the sunset, and to pay tribute to the early days of Metallica when he and frontman/guitarist James Hetfield were straining at the leash to get their songs out there, on tape, and to turn metal guitar upside down.

“Obviously, the song, I had a lot to do with writing it,” says Mustaine. “James and I, when we were working on the song, it became clear to me, when James first started playing guitar, how good of a guitar player he was. And I thought it would be really cool to close the circle, to show respect, to play the songs that I’ve written with Metallica and to honor our friendship – even though it’s been strained and ruined from emotions over the years, when we were not necessarily friendly.”

Ah yes, not necessarily friendly. Historically, Mustaine has scarcely needed an excuse to talk about Metallica. His acrimonious 1983 departure from the band has been recurring theme in his career, a regular talking point in interviews, with an on/off and largely one-way feud lasting decades but now has largely thawed.

But Mustaine insists that all this is water under bridge – Hetfield and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich are officially on his Christmas card list – and what better way to show that than put Ride the Lightning on a Megadeth record?

“One thing I’ve always said is I’ve always had a tremendous respect for James’ guitar playing – and Lars’ songwriting,” he says. “So it was cool to do this and add it to the record.”

Mustaine says he and Megadeth lead guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari have been playing around with the arrangement.

It has long been a staple of Megadeth concerts, that when performing Mechanix – a track sharing much DNA with Metallica’s The Four Horsemen, another ‘Tallica song that Mustaine co-wrote – he would play the riff and say something to the effect, “This is how they play it…” and then play it again at Mechanix tempo, i.e. much quicker.

So it will be no great surprise that when we hear this version of Ride the Lightning to hear it faster. Also, expect fireworks in the solo.

“We sped it up just a little teeny bit, and we kind of played around a little bit with the solo,” reveals Mustaine. “Teemu and I both tossed it back and forth to each other. So you might hear a little bit of some differences with the tempos, and of course, I sing different from James too.”

On this occasion, however, Mustaine says it’s not thrash metal oneupmanship. It’s a tribute, y’know, to himself, but also, of course, to Papa Het.

“It was about completing the circle and just us showing what James and I as guitar players did to change the world,” he says.

Historians disagree on when the Great Epic Thawing of Megadeth and Metallica Relations first happened. Some might date it to 2004, when Mustaine appeared in the Metallica rockumentary, Some Kind of Monster, and there was a full and frank sharing of emotions. Others would say 2010 was when it ended, with both bands sharing the bill with Anthrax and Slayer as The Big Four of thrash metal embarked on a stadium tour. That was the Berlin Wall coming down.

But there are plenty of incidences lately when Mustaine has been keen to offer praise Metallica’s way. In 2023, he admitted to Louder that Hetfield’s abilities as a guitar player blew his mind.

“I was kind of playing at Lars’ level, because Lars was still learning to play drums back then,” said Mustaine. “But watching James play guitar for the first time was kind of shocking, because I didn’t know he knew how to play guitar.”

Mustaine even had some kind words for Kirk Hammett, the man who replaced him as lead guitarist, telling Guitar World that Hammett honored Mustaine’s role in the band by playing his solos and not changing them.

“Jokes aside, I’ve always kind of poked fun at Kirk. And unfairly so, as he never did anything to me,” said Mustaine. “Whenever I felt singled out, picked on, or antagonized by James or Lars, it was really easy to pick on Kirk. But the truth is Kirk did me an honor by trying to play my solos on those early songs the way he did.

“I think that some people would have just started over again. So, I thought it was honorable that Kirk took my solos and did his best to play them as I did. That couldn’t have been easy.”

Mustaine even defended Hammett from the trolls, insisting that the Metallica shredder-in-chief has never dropped his level.

“There was a time when Kirk won every guitar contest in the world, and I don't think he's gotten any better or worse as a player,” said Mustaine. “He’s always been really good. Kirk was a good player when he was in Exodus. And he’s been steady the entire time he’s been in Metallica.”

Megadeth is scheduled for release on 23 January 2026 via Frontiers Records.

Dino Muradian has lived a movie-script life. It’s the tale of a hard-working outlaw who accidentally became a guitar pyrographer to the stars – and getting there was quite the journey.

As he grew up in Romania, the art of burning images into unfinished woods was just a hobby. But when he escaped from the Communist state six years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that hobby became his entire life.

“In August of 1983, I defected from Romania,” says Muradian, 73. “I was a commercial pilot, so I left on a Russian cropduster. After three and a half hours’ flight under the radar, I landed on an Austrian Autobahn.”

He sought refuge in Atlanta, Georgia, later moving to Washington, then Honolulu. “The Romanian authorities gave me a 25-year sentence for high treason, and asked for my extradition,” he laughs. “But everything stopped there.”

Stateside, he sold two art pieces “for serious money,” one of which earned him a feature in Fine Woodworking Magazine. Then, as he read a guitar magazine, his life changed forever. He spotted an advert from spare-parts manufacturer Warmoth displaying two raw guitar bodies, and that was his eureka moment.

He grabbed some samples of his art, went to the factory and met the two Warmoth brothers. “They pointed to a shelf with old issues of Fine Woodworking Magazine on it. Paul said, ‘Dino, I don't remember anything in those magazines – but I remember your artwork.’

“I said, ‘Give me a scrap guitar you don’t need; let me do something with it. They gave me a nice Telecaster, and in a few days I covered it in flowers. I went took it back to the factory and they couldn’t speak for five minutes. Ken called the Fender Custom Shop and said, ‘I’m sending you something on the first UPS. You need to see this.’”

Fender was impressed, but didn’t immediately bite the bullet. But ESP CEO Matt Masciandaro did – he ordered recreations of Frederic Remington's Native American paintings for a run of guitars. Then one of metal guitar’s biggest names came calling.

“In the spring of ’96, Matt asked me to pyrograph James Hetfield’s Explorer. I wasn’t sure who James was, but I said yes. Matt put me in contact with Zach Harmon, his guitar tech. James wanted ‘Something scary,’ so we came up with this elk skull idea – although it’s actually a stag.

“That was the weirdest guitar I’d ever done at the time; the Explorer has that weird shape and getting the horns to fit was really difficult. Horns don’t look like that in the wild!”

The guitar, which became a fan favorite, was donated to the ESP Museum in Tokyo, Japan, in 2019. But that was just the start of Muradian’s Metallica adventure. “The first time I met James was in Seattle in ’96, backstage,” he says.

“He made me feel so important, like he was talking to Michelangelo or something! He said, ‘Dino, this guitar sounds shitty, but I love it!’ ESP say he was always too picky about the sounds of his guitars, but that’s his art.

“That was my first heavy metal concert. I watched from the side of the stage and my whole body was vibrating. The guitar wasn't a big deal for me, but seeing him in those lights, playing it on stage, and seeing all those crazy people chanting and singing along was such an experience.

“He played a lot of songs with it, even though he said it sounded shitty. I was honoured to see the fruit of my work being appreciated like that.”

Muradian has worked on a series of Hetfield axes since then, including the Unforgiven Variax depicting scenes from the song’s video, a Cthulu design on his Snakebyte signature guitar, and a Martin D-28 that Hetfield played during December's All Within My Hands charity concert.

“The Unforgiven guitar was difficult,” Muradian says. “James had the idea to have lyrics around the sides of the guitar – black heart scarring darker still – but the neck was still attached. I have to turn the guitar a million times when I work. And because it’s black and the letters have to stay white, I had to burn around the letters; it took a long time.”

He continues: “The Martin was old and very expensive. He wanted an exact replica of Elvis’ sculpted leather guitar. He wanted to strip it for me to pyrograph. But you never know what’s underneath the paint – if it’s a dark wood, my art doesn’t show so well. So they got a newer one to work with.

“I finished the piece and sent it to a luthier in San Francisco to rebuild it. Then I then realized I’d missed a little arm from the letter ‘E.’ The show was so close so I had to jump on a flight from Honolulu. The mistake was corrected in about three minutes and James never knew!”

Naturally, it was only a matter of time until Hetfield’s gear-hoarding bandmate Kirk Hammett wanted a slice of the action. So one of his ESP Eclipses was pyrographed from top to bottom, on a background of the manuscript of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven – Hammett’s favorite poem.

“The second guitar I did for Kirk was in 2023; the 15th of a run of 15 Eclipses made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nosferatu film. He loved that. Nobody knows this, but one of the craters on the Moon on that guitar is in the shape of Romania!”

Muradian pyrographed B.B. King’s 17th Lucille for his 70th birthday – and his work for the Fender and ESP Custom Shops continues. Asked who his dream client would be, he doesn’t skip a beat in answering: “Taylor Swift.” Why? He thinks she’d benefit from the surprising tonal magic of his work.

“I’ve worked with violins, mandolins, cellos, you name it,” he says. “The owners all tell me that afterwards, ‘They sound amazing’ – especially if the whole instrument has been covered. The burning process changes something in the wood. It changes its structure, and it makes the instrument sound more powerful.”

So, Taylor, if you’re reading this, give Muradian a call. Maybe it could be a wedding present?

• See more of Muradian’s work on Instagram.

Metallica’s James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett took to YouTube to wish ESP Guitars a very happy 50th Anniversary, the long-time endorsees checking in from their rehearsal room HQ, signature guitars in hand. But in the process they might just have something very intriguing indeed.

There’s an Easter egg in this video, and it looks like this could be a signature tube amp for Hetfield from Mesa/Boogie. Once you can see it you can’t unsee it. Behind Hammett, there’s a guitar amp head, sitting on a 4x12 guitar cabinet with a Metallica logo stencilled in white on the black grille cloth.

The amp is a variant of a Mesa/Boogie Mark Series that we’ve never seen before, with a decorative brushed metal plating on the grille (kind of like something you would see on a hot-rodded, supercharged automobile, which is very Hetfield), and on the top-left of the control panel we have what looks like Hetfield’s initials.

“It looks like a two channel amp with some really weird knobs in the middle,” writes one comment from Mesa Sean. “We’ve seen that [amp] in the studio for a couple years now. It would be really cool if they released something.”

If it is a Hetfield amp, it would have been a long time coming. As noted above, and in a 2017 thread on the Mesa/Boogie forum, this mystery Mesa has actually been in the Metallica HQ for years, also appearing in a video from 94.5 KATS with drummer Lars Ulrich and Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor goofing around.

The video resolution is not great, but you can see this same amp in the lower left-hand side of the frame.

This new video gives us a better look. It could be that the metal plate on the amp’s front has been updated. If it was a prototype for Hetfield, that time scale could check out.

Designing a Mark Series Boogie for one of metal guitar’s biggest stars is a serious project, and it would take some time. There would be revisions. Also, consider the upheaval at Mesa/Boogie, the takeover by Gibson, the departure of its founder Randall Smith. That could delay the project.

In July, Mesa/Boogie released the Mark IIC++ "Crunch Berries" head that Metallica used to give their tone its signature venom in the mid ‘80s.

The Mark IIC++ was initially a custom mod that only those in the know had. It was designed for Vivian Campbell, then playing in Dio, who wanted more added “gain and girth” to his electric guitar tone. Well, Metallica got wind of that. Hammett told MusicRadar that this Boogie, allied to EMG active humbuckers, was the secret sauce to their sound.

“They made very few of those Boogies and we happened to get a few. And those amps, along with EMG pickups were defining our sound,” he said. “They enabled us to get the sound that we needed to get across. If it wasn’t for those Mesa/Boogie amps and EMG pickups, I don’t know how much further we would have got with just Marshalls. With the Boogies it was something different.”

If Mesa/Boogie is going to release a Hetfield Mark Series in the not-so-distant future it would be A) Not unprecedented, after it released a signature model for Dream Theatre’s John Petrucci, and B) Foreshadowed somewhat by the “Crunch Berries” release, and its antecedent, the Mark IIC+, which was reissued last year.

Hammett has already collaborated on a couple of notable signature amps with Randall. There was the KH120RH, the RM100KH, which was a three-channel 100-watter. We can confirm that playing Creeping Death on a Gibson Flying V through this amp is a lot of fun.

But sometimes you need more fun, and Randall and Hammett had just the thing in the 120-watt KH103 head, designed with Mike Fortin, with three channels, three gain voicings per channel… The thing looked nuts. Fortin also made him the Meathead.

C’mon, Mesa/Boogie, let’s get Hetfield one, too. Or would someone at least let us know what that knob in the middle of the control panel does?

In the absence of any more details, we quite like some of the theories posted by Mesa forum user screamingdaisy: “Theory A: It’s a blend knob... channel 2/Recto, channel 3/Crunchberries, blend to taste. Theory B: it’s a chorus knob... they built the [Roland] JC-120 chorus into the amp. Theory C: it’s a scoop knob... they built James’ parametric EQ into the amp.”

And Theory D it’s a red herring just to mess with our heads. Mission accomplished. Where were we, anyways? Yeah, many happy returns, ESP.

Jason Momoa has commissioned an exacting replica of James Hetfield’s iconic Elektra Flying V copy from Polish custom electric guitar company Krupi Guitars, and it looks and sounds incredible.

This is a copy of one of the most-famous copycat electrics of all time, the so-called OGV – the white Elektra Flying Wedge that Hetfield used on Metallica’s seminal 1983 debut album, Kill ‘Em All, and thrashed into submission over the subsequent years as the Bay Area quartets charted their unstoppable rise to superstardom.

Krupi has replicated the OGV in exacting detail, from the finish wear to the hardware (aftermarket Sperzel locking tuners FTW), to the middle finger graphic on the back – Krupi even recreated the effect of original OGV’s infamous headstock break.

That break, lest we forget, was a hinge-moment in Metallica (and metal guitar) history because the OGV’s temporary absence while a luthier in Austin, TX, was repairing it gave Hetfield the opportunity to check out the Gibson Explorer, and he liked what he heard.

Krupi says it was an honor to work on this replica.

“Here’s a faithful replica of James Hetfield’s legendary Electra OGV – the very guitar that roared on Kill ‘Em All and helped forge the sound of Metallica’s early days,” it writes on Instagram. “Some time ago Jason Momoa – [whom] I truly admire, a huge Metallica fan – reached out to ask if I could build one just like it. I did. And I poured everything into it.

“Recreating this piece of metal history wasn’t just a challenge – it was a privilege. It meant a lot to us, both as a builders and a fans. Enjoy it, Jason.”

This is not just about the guitar, though. Just look at that guitar case. You’ve got Momoa’s name emblazoned on it in the Metallica typeface – in a shade of yellow-orange that makes us think of the Jump in the Fire 12” – and a whole bunch of Zorlac stickers featuring the work of artist Brian Schroeder, better known as Pushead, who has provided some iconic designs for Metallica’s merch.

Pushead’s Damage Inc. and Harvester of Sorrow T-shirt designs are all-timers. Anyway, those stickers really tie the whole thing together.

And somehow, the OGV, battered, bruised, repaired, is still in Hetfield’s regular rotation. Not bad for a cheap copy. It looked the part. It sounded the part.

In his 2023 coffee table book Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield, the Metallica frontman recalled how drummer Lars Ulrich reacted when he first saw it.

“What I think about most is how happy I was when Lars came over [to see it], because it felt like the beginning of all the ‘coolness’ that we were trying to achieve,” said Hetfield. “It felt like we had arrived… [like] we were going to make it… I did not care that it was a copy of a Gibson. It played great, it sounded great, and it had the look that I wanted.”

There was no need to sweat the details. Hetfield didn’t. For a time, he was famously unaware that it actually was a copy.

“I thought it was a Gibson Flying V, just like the one Michael Schenker used,” said Hetfield. “That’s all I cared about. It was white, it was a V-shape, it had a Gibson plate on it, and it was cheap.”

Japanese copies of classic US electric guitar designs were getting better as the 1980s dawned. Some collectors argue that they sound better than the Gibson or Fender counterparts of the ‘70s, the imitators challenging the US companies to up their game.

But Hetfield’s Flying Wedge was not quite as exacting with the spec as some copycat imports. Take the neck joint for a start. Not that a young Hetfield cared about these things.

“Now I know why [it was cheap], because it was made in Japan,” he said. “For me, it didn't matter. Later on, I think when we were in New York the first time, somebody said, ‘Err, that’s not a Gibson! It’s got a bolt-on neck!’ I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.”

And it didn’t matter. It sounded ferocious, especially when going through the Metallica frontman’s legendary Marshall amp, which was stolen after the recording of Kill ‘Em All and lost to history. Hetfield described the OGV as “like a shield”, giving him the confidence to front a band that would spearhead thrash metal’s ascendancy.

“I’m not being overly dramatic in saying that if there was a guitar that changed the course of my history, it was the OGV,” said Hetfield. “It's one of the fastest guitars I have to this day, with very, very good mids. It's very clear but crunchy, too.”

Gojira are behemoths of the metal scene – and, during an appearance that can only be described as history-making at last year's Olympic Games, the band firmly cemented their influence beyond the metal realm on the global stage.

And for the gearheads, guitarist Joe Duplantier dazzled audiences with a custom ESP electric guitar specially curated for the occasion: an ESP XJ-1 – boasting an all-chrome aesthetic, EverTune bridge, and a DiMarzio Fortitude bridge humbucker – that made metal (and music) history.

At the time, keen-eyed fans were quick to speculate over Duplantier's decision to play an ESP on that occasion, especially considering he has long been established as a loyal Charvel artist.

“It’s funny, people talk about instruments almost like marriage,” he quips in a new Guitar World interview.

“‘How could you? I thought everything was going well!’ It’s not like that, okay, can everybody relax?! I love Charvel and I’m proud of the signature we made. Nothing went wrong. But I’m just a dude who wants to have fun and try new things."

Indeed, Duplantier has been wielding Charvel's Tele-style San Dimas models for over 10 years – a run which has also included several signatures over the years, including his latest, the Joe Duplantier Signature Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 2 HH Mahogany.

“At the end of the day, from Fender to Gibson, I just love guitars. I’ve actually had a relationship with ESP for years. Hetfield personally hooked me up with them back in the day. He actually picked up the phone saying, ‘Dude, have you tried an ESP?’”

Duplantier clarifies that he still uses his signature Charvel “and will continue to do so”.

“I just wanted to experiment in other fields,” he divulges. “It feels like I’m expanding and ESP has a lot to offer. I’m not cheating on anyone, I want all the instruments! The Metallica connection was a big part of it. Bill from Mastodon loves ESP, and I’ve played his guitar a bunch of times. I’ve talking to [Head Of Artist Relations] Tony Rauser about making something different from what I’ve done before.”

These changes also come from a place where he's finally accepting his role as more of a frontman.

“I used to go on stage with dark shirts, jeans, and guitars, looking like a black hole. I don’t know if it’s a midlife crisis, but enough is enough, I want to shine on stage,” he adds with a laugh. “Maybe I’ll design a mirror guitar, so I can blind people with the spotlight!”

Last year, ESP sealed the deal by confirming Duplantier as a signature artist, with their announcement coinciding with Gojira's appearance at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

Guitar World's full interview with Joe Duplantier will be published in the coming weeks.

When Metallica released their fifth album, lovingly referred to as the Black Album, in 1991, they were rightly crowned the world's biggest metal band. Decades later, no metal record has yet to surpass its staggering 30 million units sold, but with its controversial follow-up, 1996’s Load, the band offered a very different sound.

Pushing a lighter, more commercial aesthetic, and chopped locks to boot, many felt the band had eschewed the identity that garnered them such lofty success. Now Bob Rock, who produced both those albums, has said it was a record that reshaped James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett’s guitar-playing relationship.

“Before Load, James did all the rhythms,” Rock tells The Metallica Report podcast (via Blabbermouth). “So the idea is Kirk was gonna play rhythms along with James. That changed everything, and some people don't like it.”

Rock had entered the fray their previous three records had been produced by Flemming Rasmussen (who has a theory for why ...And Justice For All was so light on bass guitar). Their new producer found that those experiences had left them a little limited.

“What they knew is how he put together a record, but I don't do that,” Rock says. “The way they did it, it's very mechanical. You can't go back and fix a kick drum. And you can't really realize what the whole song is until you finish it. But what you do when you record live, you get a good example of pretty much everything.”

That also saw Jason Newstead's approach to his bass parts heavily scrutinized.

“Jason wasn't playing bass like a bass player. He was just doubling the guitar,” Rock explains. “So I taught him, like, ‘Dude, be a bass player.’ So there are points where he's not playing the guitar riff; he's playing with the drums. That would've never happened if you just did it to a click and did all the guitars.

“So that opened the door, and it's my fault that I opened that door, because what they realized, through the recording of the Black Album, was there was something different about that, and in Load they embraced it.”

Rock is, in his own words, “a song person,” and he encouraged Metallica’s desire to experiment. They were getting inspired by different bands; Load is less Motörhead and Black Sabbath, more Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd. That set a precedent, and the way Hetfield and Hammett approached their tandem on the record was a key driver behind the band’s change of colors.

As per the band's chat with Guitar World ahead of the release of Reload in 1997, that approach changed again.

“Kirk had a little more freedom on this one,” Hetfield explained. “His only instruction was to not play what I played. We wanted a point-counterpoint kind of vibe. And we're really splitting the guitars now to get some really different things going on.

“It's not exciting to us anymore,” he added of the album's lack of high-octane thrash riffs. “It's a little more exciting for us now to figure out more fucked-up chords, things that grind, dissonant bits.”

Today I’d like to talk about downpicking – picking or strumming consecutive downstrokes – and why it can be so musically effective.

This is something I learned from studying the riff-writing style of Metallica’s James Hetfield. If you think about the approach to guitar that I’m mostly known for, it seems to have little in common with Hetfield’s.

But I would argue that it has much to do with it, because so much of the energy, feel and sound of one’s rhythm parts has to do with the manner in which we attack our strings.

When it comes to sound and feel, there are huge differences between alternate picking (down-up-down-up), legato phrasing (using hammer-ons and pull-offs) and downpicking.

In Figure 1, I begin playing a two-note G5 chord in an eighth-note rhythm using alternate strumming then switch to consecutive downstrokes in bar 3.

Notice the big difference in sound between the two strumming techniques. The difference becomes even greater if you additionally palm mute the downstrokes… and that’s without even changing your tone or engaging an effect!

A good way for me to exemplify the distinct qualities of downstrokes versus upstrokes is by demonstrating the two main parts of an instrumental tune of mine called Lilypad.

When crafting rhythm guitar parts, I like to work from a “hook,” or compositional, mindset, and my approach here was to create a lead line that was generated by a rhythm part.

The tune’s main theme outlines the chords Bb (Bb, D, F) and Ab (Ab, C, Eb). In devising this rhythm part, I set out to use two-note dyads to describe each of these chords. In Figure 2, I play an ascending series of dyads, using the triadic tones of Bb.

Figure 3 illustrates the “A section” of Lilypad, which is phrased with a combination of 16th- and eighth-note rhythms, all of which I attack with palm-muted downstrokes. The figure is built almost entirely from dyads, most of which are based on a Bb triad.

At the end of bar 4, I move down chromatically, from Bb to A to Ab, then proceed to play the same four-bar idea in bars 5-8 but transposed down a whole step, using Ab chord tones.

The tune’s next section moves down to the relative minor key of Bb major, G minor. As shown in Figure 4, here I play a combination of downstrokes and upstrokes, downpicking bass notes on the low E string, followed by upstroke dyad “stabs” on the top two strings, with pairs of fret-hand-muted “dead-string” accents sandwiched in between on the D and G strings.

In bar 3, I move this idea down a whole step and two frets to imply and Fm sound.

As you can see, the difference in pick attacks makes these two parts sound completely different. As always, I’m thinking like a drummer here. Adopting this mindset can help drive your rhythm parts in unique and effective ways.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Halloween might be a little over four months away, but that hasn’t stopped Wes Borland from getting into the spirit of things by cosplaying as James Hetfield while supporting Metallica on tour.

The Limp Bizkit electric guitar titan has been taking part in Metallica’s M72 world tour, and to celebrate the final stop of the current run, Borland donned a curly blonde wig as he comedically cosplayed as an ’80s-era James Hetfield.

It was an exemplary effort from Borland, who – along with ripped jeans, a classic Metallica tee, sweatbands around his wrists, and white high-top trainers – donned a white Jackson Kelly to troll Hetfield’s own iconic Explorer-style ESP

The Kelly – which tipped its hat to the metal guitar Hetfield frequently played throughout the 1980s – also has “EET PHO” scrawled on its body.

This is a nifty reference to Hetfield’s similarly-shaped 1987 ESP MX220, which has the charming words “EET FUK” written on it. However, a skull mask ensures that the ever-effervescent Borland still has some of his own flair in the look.

Speaking to Playboy in 2001, Hetfield had said, “Limp Bizkit seems a little cartoony to me”, and while that opinion may have changed 24 years on, Borland’s comical cosplay probably does compound that sentiment a little.

In related news, Borland, who released a signature Tonality plugin with STL Tones last year, has spoken about how his beloved Jackson King V guitar started life as a factory reject, but has since become so much more.

Gibson, meanwhile, recently sent Metallica fans into a frenzy in December when it teased a new signature run of Hetfield’s Explorer. Sadly, no such run is yet to materialize, as it turns out it was a special one-off build for Jason Mamoa.

Metallica's hard-working techs have also given an eye-opening insight into the gear needed for the tour. The band are currently touring with 64 guitars, and 36 need to be shred-ready at any given moment. They also go through a ridiculous 6,000 guitar picks each night. A whopping 800 locals are also employed to support the running of each show. And now 1x blonde wig can be added to the band's sizable itinerary.

There is no shortage of tell-all autobiographies from pioneers of thrash metal. While none of the current members of Metallica or the founding members of Slayer have released memoirs yet, the glory days of the San Francisco-area movement and other major thrash scenes have been well documented in books by members of Megadeth (Dave Mustaine, David Ellefson, Marty Friedman, Nick Menza), two guys from Anthrax (Scott Ian, Frank Bello) and Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick.

So, why did it take thrash veteran Gary Holt so long to throw his tales in the ring when he was there from the very start? After all, Holt was hanging out with Kirk Hammett in Exodus long before the latter left to join Metallica – and he is the only SF guitarist to play on every Exodus album and perform live in Slayer from 2011 to 2019 and again at their recent reunion shows.

In other words, Holt is arguably more qualified than anyone from the Bay Area to chronicle the rise and fall of thrash metal. Initially, he had some reservations, but he eventually came around.

“I’ve been asked over the years when I was going to do a book, and at first I didn’t want to because I know where all the bodies are buried and I didn’t want to put anyone out to dry or get them in trouble,” he said before the recent release of A Fabulous Disaster: From the Garage to Madison Square Garden. The Hard Way. Holt, chuckles, then continues in an understated voice.

“But then I realized I could focus on my own stories and spill the dirt on myself without involving anyone else. That made the idea a lot more appealing.”

Holt’s initial plan was to flex his storytelling chops and write the book on his own; however, he couldn’t find time to sit down and dedicate himself fully to the project and decided he needed to find a compatible co-author. That happened when Holt was being interviewed for a cover story for Decibel magazine by Adam Tepedelen. After their conversation, Tepedelen asked Holt if he might be interested in working together on a book.

“It was the right time and right place,” Holt says. “I said, ‘Okay, let’s try it and see how it goes. If we click, we’ll make it happen.’ We started talking and it worked out really well from the start, so we kept going and I’m really happy with the end result.”

Named after Exodus’ third album, 1989’s Fabulous Disaster, the book begins with Holt looking back at his earliest days as a thrash guitarist, working with friends to create music that resonated with the sounds of various scenes, including the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (especially early Iron Maiden and Venom) and Eighties hardcore punk (Discharge, Cro-Mags).

After being Hammett’s friend and guitar tech, Holt joined Exodus when guitarist Tim Agnello left the band. Exodus played backyard parties and dreamed of making a quality demo they could exchange with other tape traders. “We just wanted to be heavy as fuck,” he writes. “And I’m pretty sure no major record label saw that as a marketable attribute.”

In addition to giving him a creative outlet, Exodus provided Holt with a community that provided a temporary escape from poverty and ostracism through the misanthropic lens of violent music, excessive drinking, drugs and juvenile delinquency.

In unflinching detail, Holt reveals how Exodus was a platform to overindulge in each of the above with some of the craziest motherfuckers in the scene, some of whom, including Exodus’ original unhinged vocalist Paul Baloff, are no longer with us.

Lucky for thrash fans, Exodus worked just as hard on their music as they did at trashing houses, torturing so-called posers and drinking everything within their reach. As Exodus released their heralded 1985 debut, Bonded by Blood, developed a strong following and became successful, Holt and his bandmates wrangled with inter-band turmoil, addiction and the collapse of metal in the Nineties.

After breaking up the band and returning to a blue-collar job to make ends meet, Holt experienced a redemptive second wave of success with a reformed Exodus and an invitation to join Slayer.

The euphoric highs and debilitating lows are vividly captured in A Fabulous Disaster, which is flavored with enticing drama, self-deprecating humor and honest, sometimes agonizing reflection.

“Half of the battle to doing the book right was feeling comfortable about opening all of these wounds,” Holt says. “You really have to feel like the person you’re working with is someone you can share this stuff with.

“We got so many good stories in there and there’s tons leftover that wouldn’t fit in the book, which are just crazy, hilarious, cringe-inducing, horrifically bad stuff and amazingly good stuff and everything in between. Hopefully, I’ll revisit some of that stuff down the road.”

In a candid conversation, Holt reveals what compelled him to roll up his sleeves and unflinchingly tell his life story, what he gained from the revising Exodus’ gritty past, and his plans for the follow-up to Exodus’ 2021 album, Persona Non Grata. He also talks about Slayer’s reunion shows, why he didn’t want to play on Kerry King’s 2024 solo album, the rigors of arthritis and how he’d be okay if he had to give up music and return to roofing for a living.”

Many autobiographies are filled with anecdotes about booze, drugs and debauchery. What makes yours different?

“These things usually follow a formula: A guy gets famous, makes lots of bad decisions, develops drug habits and eventually achieves redemption. But most of these dudes don’t fall quite as far as I did. They don’t develop a meth habit and end up shoveling dog shit for $6 an hour in between releasing an album like Bonded by Blood and playing Madison Square Garden. I’ve been through a lot, and it’s all in there.”

You illustrate that juxtaposition in the chapter “Riffing in ’83. Roofing in ’93.”

“When I quit Exodus in 1993, I needed some time to figure out what I wanted to do in music, but I also needed a job. So I got a job as a roofer, and I was out in the 100-degree weather hauling 50-lb rolls of tar paper up a 40-foot ladder. I know the meaning of work and I’ve never been ashamed to get my hands dirty.”

Was there anything in the book that you were reluctant to reveal?

“No, because I was really particular with what I wrote about. I didn’t feel it was my place to tell really dark stories about other people – other than what was already public knowledge. There’s a lot of great stories I could have told, but then I’d have been dragging down other people without their approval.

“When it comes to my own problems and my own drug use, I’ve always been an open book, but there are parts where I wanted people to cringe when they read it. So that’s why there’s all that stuff in there about sitting in a warehouse smoking meth with crackheads and prostitutes because that’s who I used to be. That’s not who I am now.”

Did you learn anything about yourself while writing this book?

“I don’t know if I learned anything I didn’t already know. But I do have a ton of regret, and I carry a ton of guilt. I’ve seen people I know doing the VH1 Behind the Music thing, and sometimes when they talk about their wild days, they smile and say, ‘Yeah, it was fun.’

“I’m different. When I look back at some of my indiscretions and the selfish things I did that hurt people, I’m not proud. I was a delinquent and a lot of the things I did were not cool. But that’s what pushes me now to be an even better father, grandfather, husband and bandmate.”

“I’m constantly striving to improve, which is something we all should do. Who wants to just be happy when there is room in your life to be better? I try to be kind to people even though I write songs about hate. Doing that is my therapy. My wife always gets on me about how many times a year I give money to random strangers on GoFundMe.

“I do it because I can, and if it’s legit, why not help people? [Our drummer] Tom [Hunting] needed money to fight cancer, and a lot of people helped him through the GoFundMe I started for him. I’m just trying to give back when I can. Karma.”

Do you believe wisdom comes with age, or do you think that the more experience you have about the world, the less you understand its complexities?

“There’s truth to both. When you’re young, you think you know everything, and when you get a bit older you realize you don’t. But if you’ve paid attention to your own failings, you’ll learn from them and hopefully improve. I guess that’s the simplest way to look at it. Just learn from your mistakes.”

Do you want readers to view A Fabulous Disaster as a cautionary tale?

“If anyone sees it like that or if it helps anyone who’s having trouble clean up their life, then that’s great. But I’m a guitar player. I’m not curing cancer. I write riffs and I’m really good at it. And I love what I’m doing, so it’s not work. I’m 100 percent constantly aware of how lucky I am that I have a career, and when I think back and realize that I threw it all away for a long-ass time, I just feel stupid.

“First, I threw it all away because I was unhappy, then later I threw it away because I was on drugs. And now, I’ve bounced back from that and I’m back with my band making music. No, I’m not selling out arenas. I’m not selling out theaters. But when you factor in that I’m able to tour, which I love, and when you couple it with merchandise sales – because we’re all traveling clothes salesmen – I’m doing just fine. And I love doing this.”

Last year, Slayer announced a handful of reunion shows. Before they were scheduled, there was bad blood between guitarist Kerry King and vocalist and bassist Tom Araya, and Kerry pulled no punches about Tom when he did press for his solo album From Hell I Rise. Was there any tension between those guys during the Slayer reunion shows?

“There was no weirdness at all. Those shows were amazing. It was a great return. I hadn’t seen anybody since I left after the last show we did. Especially on the anniversary of the show. We usually send each other texts: ‘I really appreciate you. Miss you.’ Blah, blah. But I hadn’t seen anyone. And [drummer] Paul Bostaph lives about 40 minutes north from me up in the woods. So this was a great chance to see them all again.”

Will there be any more Slayer shows?

“There won’t be any more full tours. There won’t be any albums. If we come back and do a couple shows here and there – as Kerry has alluded to – I think that’s perfect. I love Slayer, but I’m not ready to put Exodus on hold anymore. That’s my band for life. Slayer are my family, but Exodus were my first family.

“They sat on the sidelines and used a stunt double for me for a long time – just shy of 10 years. And if we do a couple more shows as Slayer, that means I get to play those songs that I’ve grown to love. But I’ve got to record and tour with Exodus full-time again. That’s my priority.”

Did you hear the Kerry King album before it came out?

“No. I knew who was in the band, which was just confirmation that it was going to be killer. And then when I heard it, I loved it. It definitely has a Slayer vibe because Kerry is one-fourth of Slayer, so of course it’s going to have that feel.

“I’m always going to sound like I do in Exodus unless I was absolutely trying my hardest not to sound like Exodus – like if I was going to issue a funk album – and even that would probably have a little Exodus in it.”

Would you want to do a funk album?

“That would be awesome. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but I love listening to that stuff. I don’t listen to metal at home. I like listening to the classic stuff I grew up on.

“You could drop me on a desert island with the UFO catalog, or just Rainbow’s Rainbow Rising and I’d be happy. Nowadays, my car radio is either on the local sports talk channel or it’s on the soft stuff station and I’m listening to Backstreet Boys and Adele. I love pop music – always have, though.”

Did you wish Kerry asked you to play with him on his solo album?

“No, I don’t play on nobody’s solo record. That’s not a knock on anybody who does, but I’m self-aware of who I am, and if I’m going to play on someone’s solo record your name better be Rob Halford. I mean, if James Hetfield did a solo record… I don’t know if I’d want to play for Hetfield. I’d be tempted, though.”

Nobody down-picks like Hetfield.

“Yeah, and with the tendon problems I’ve had over the years, down-picking is the first thing that’s slowed down.”

How bad are your tendon problems?

“Man, I’ve had arthritis and chronic tennis elbow. I had to fight back from them and they’ve affected me in both arms. On the last Exodus album, I had so many cortisone shots I lost count.

“I had one a couple months before recording the album and that worked wonders until we tracked The Beatings Will Continue (Until Morale Improves). I was down picking on that and I blew my right elbow out. I had to go to physical therapy to get back to playing.

“So, if I worked with James he might give me shit about keeping up on some of the down-picking stuff, but the things I do well, I do as well as anybody else. With down-picking, you learn little cheats to get through it.”

Can you make alternate picking sound like down-picking?

“I do both. I’ll go down-up-down-down-down-down-down/down-up-down-down-down-down-down… That gives me a split-second break. But everybody cheats. I’ve seen videos of James leaving out down-picks. You know?

“We’re living with 60-year-old arms now. On these reunion shows, Slayer was playing Reborn. And Kerry and I were like, ‘Man, that’s fast!’ Goddamn, that was fun to play for those two shows, but I was super-relieved when we got through it.”

How far along are you on the follow up to Exodus’ 2021 album, Persona Non Grata?

“I’ve got about 20 new songs that we’re working on. Tom Hunting and I worked out some of the stuff in advance together because as long as we go into the studio with five or six completed songs, then we’ve got a good starting point. We tend to write a lot in the studio, anyway. We like to do what I call our album summer camp, where we all live in one house together and immerse ourselves in the music.

“We did that on our last album during the pandemic and it gave us the greatest opportunity we’ve ever had. We shipped a truckload of recording material to Tom’s house in the mountains in Lake Almonor, California, along with Steve Lagudi, our engineer. And we stayed there and worked on the album. Of course, there wasn’t anywhere to go then, but I’m hoping we can have that same game plan this time around.”

How would you describe the new Exodus material?

“It’s hard to say, because every album is its own thing. Some of the record is super, super fast, and other parts are big, slow, and ominous with lots of space to breathe and build. And there are a couple moments that are, dare I say, doomy. There’s a lot of melody in there, but it’s also really heavy.

“Exodus fans are gonna dig it. [Guitarist] Lee Altus has a bunch of stuff he’s still working on, so that will add more elements to the songs. The only challenge is hitting our recording goal, otherwise it’s going to be out in 2026, and we have a bunch of tours lined up, but we’ll figure it out.”

You look like a rock star onstage and you’ve lived like a rock star, but you seem humbler than some of your peers.

“Look, I’m not out there selling out arenas. Exodus just got off our first headlining tour in the U.S. in a long time, and it was a blast. Maybe the shows weren’t as well-attended as some we’ve done in the past, but they were really good because a lot of bands on the road right now are getting hammered.

“I just have to be smarter these days, so I’m involved in all sides of the business. People don’t realize that when I’m home from tour and you buy a shirt or even a guitar pick from me, I’m the guy who puts it in the package. I don’t hire someone else to do it. And I’m lucky to do it.

“I live a good life. I have great grandkids, great kids, a great wife, and a great band. I was lucky to have two great bands for a long time. If the bottom fell out in music for me tomorrow, I’d go get a job again. I have no hangups about that. I appreciate what I have and the position I’m in. That’s something that I’ll never take for granted.”

• A Fabulous Disaster is out now via De Capo.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Any time spent in the world of metal and rock guitar playing will have downpicking show up sooner rather than later.

It's because so many bands, ranging from Slayer to Megadeth and Meshuggah to Killswitch Engage, rely on down picking to create their riffs.

For many, the player most revered and credited fror the technique is Metallica's James Hetfield. With its use in so many of the band's iconic songs, he has been a vital source of inspiration for countless guitarists over several decades.

The essence of downpicking is a pick motion starting on top of one string (or perhaps two strings to sound a power chord) and then striking it, moving the pick towards the ground in one small motion.

To repeat the down-pick you will need to return to the original position by moving your pick up, towards your head. This up-pick will not sound or connect with the string, though, so consider it a 'ghost' stroke – it occurs but is not heard.

The combination of a heard down-pick and a silent up-pick will allow you to play powerful riffs, emphasize a melodic sequence, or accent notes and chords.

In this article, the fundamentals of downpicking are covered so you can establish a solid technique foundation. Then, you'll move on to a series of exercises designed to improve speed, clarity and control.

Tab examples

Example 1 - downpicking primer

This exercise is a primer for developing steady downpicking. Keep your picking motion controlled by using your wrist instead of your arm, and make sure each note is played with the same pick angle and velocity.

Don't forget up-picks are silent after each down pick.

There are four downpicked low E notes in the first bar (each is a 1/4 note - a quarter note - long). The next bar is silent so you've time to rest and reflect. Bars three and four are the same as bars one and two. It can be tempting to speed up, so pay close attention to the consistent tempo provided by the drums.

Example 2 - 1/4 and 8th note downpicking

This is a combination of down picked 1/4 notes and 1/8th notes (typically called 8th notes). The 8th notes here mean 8 notes in each bar of 4/4 but it's easier to count each bar like this so the main 1/4 note beats are clear: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &’.

The played 8th notes occur at beat 3 of bars 1-3 where two down picks are used. Be careful you don't tense up too much with the faster 8th notes and watch your silent up pick doesn't get caught on a string.

Example 3 - downpicked power chords

In this exercise, you’ll continue with the 8th note feel, but now with power chords (two note chords of root and 5th) with more emphasis on the ‘&’ of each beat.

By highlighting the weaker parts of the bar (that is, the '&'), you create syncopated phrases which sound appealing. As for the powerchords used, Bb5 isn't in the commonly used E Aeolian mode (E-F#-G-A-B-C) or even the spicier E Phrygian mode (E-F-G-A-B-C). The latter mode is more relevant here due to the F5 chord in bar 4.

The Bb note in Bb5 could be considered from the E blues scale, though - E-G-A-Bb-B-D.

Theory aside, it's all very metal-sounding!

Example 4 - downpicked triplets

This exercise features 8th note triplets (three notes played per beat counted either as 1 & a, 2 & a or straw-be-ry, straw-ber-ry) to speed up the rhythms and bring you closer to hard rock and metal stylings.

Palm muting (shown as PM above the tab) is a fantastic picking hand technique for rhythmic clarity and tightness. However, be careful not to press your picking hand's palm too hard or too far over the strings as this can alter and/or muddy note clarity. For more on palm muting, check out this extensive lesson.

Example 5 - 16th-note downpicking

Now you’ll work with 16th notes, counted here as ‘1 e & a, 2 e & a, 3 e & a, 4 e & a’. To create breathing space, you'll play two 16th notes and an 8th note on beats 1 and 3, and rest on beats 2 and 4.

Use the pauses to relax your picking hand and avoid fatigue.

This 16th-16th-8th rhythm is called the reverse gallop: for more on gallop rhythms check out our lesson on the topic.

Example 6 - 16th-note stamina with downpicking

In this final exercise, you'll play all four notes in each 16th note grouping.

Pay attention to the accents in bars 2 and 4 (shown as > under the notation), as they provide contrast within the long 16th-note sequences.

When using palm muting, it's common to create accents, not by playing harder (although that is an option) but by reducing the muting effect (or indeed, not using it at all).

This contrast results in open, bright notes (no palm muting) for the accents and tight, bassier notes (palm muted) for the regular 16ths. Keep your picking arm relaxed to prevent tension.

Examples of downpicking

Metallica - Master of Puppets

Many of Metallica's songs feature down picking riffs. These include Seek & Destroy, Creeping Death, And Justice For All, Blackened and the performance included here: Master of Puppets.

Watch and listen to how James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett use palm muted downpicking for the fast percussive riffing. This is famous – and technically infamous – for good reason.

Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train

This features Randy Rhoads' fantastic F# minor intro with 8th-note downpicking before the busier 16th note riff that shifts to the more cheery A major. An undisputed iconic rock/metal song fueled by the Les Paul virtuoso.

Status Quo - Down Down

Watch Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt play this famous 8th-note based riff at the Glastonbury Festival in 2009. The balance of precision and stamina for the song's duration is harder than they make it look.

Notice many of their up-strokes are 'ghost' strokes that aren't heard, and when they do make contact it adds further rhythmic energy to the relentless downpicking.

Even though he's best known for crafting James Hetfield’s most striking and creative axes, Kenneth Lawrence doesn’t play guitar. He’s a bassist.

As most bassists do, at age 14, he picked up the bass because his group of friends started a band and they didn’t know anyone that played it. Turns out, the bass was the right choice for Lawrence.

Inspired by Alembic designs, Lawrence transitioned to guitar building while he was attending college. But it was his collaborations with Hetfield that made him one of the metal world's most talked-about luthiers.

What inspired you to start building guitars?

“I had a job at a technical college in their bookstore. Evening class time was very boring, because hardly anybody would come by. So I talked my boss into letting me bring in my Rickenbacker bass, so I could sit and play while I was waiting for somebody to come by.

“One night I thought, ‘There’s maybe five pieces of wood in here – maybe I could figure out how to make one.’ I was already right there at college, so I took a class in introductory cabinet making. That led me into cabinetry and furniture, which I ended up doing for almost five years.

“Part of that was with a really incredible Danish cabinet company with all these European master craftsmen; that was really a lot of fun. It got me started – but there was still missing information on the guitars.

“I met some musicians from a town in northern California that were playing in and around Edmonton. They invited me to come down to Arcata to play music. I was actually looking for a way to get out of Edmonton; I was feeling a little lost there. So I jumped on it, and it turned out to be an absolutely perfect place for me to be.

“Lo and behold, down in the south part of town was a little shop named Moonstone guitars. That’s where things really took off – it gave me the information I didn’t have. I started my own business about four years later, 1986, in that very shop.”

Of course, everyone wants to know how you got started making guitars for James Hetfield.

“I met Doug West from Mesa/Boogie and we hit it off. I was still making basses, primarily – very, very occasionally a guitar would come along. We ended up playing music together and I spent a lot of time at Mesa. Doug helped get me a distributor in Japan and a distributor in Europe, which really helped take off the bass stuff.

“I would leave instruments at Mesa for Doug to show to whoever might be stopping by. He took one of the basses to a Metallica rehearsal when they were working on their guitar rigs, to see if Jason Newsted might be interested. Doug told me that James liked the workmanship on the instrument and he kept flipping it back and forth, studying it. Then he asked if we could meet.

“That was kind of a strange interview because I didn’t have a single guitar to show him – I went for a guitar commission with a carload of basses! I laid them all out on the floor, and he went, ‘Okay, let’s make a guitar.’”

How did the collaboration get started?

“I found out afterwards that he’d wanted an Explorer style guitar. He had Zach Harmon send me one of one of his older ESPs, a white one. I took a pattern of the silhouette of the body and looked at the shape of the neck and some of the setup items and all that. And I had this headstock a friend of mine had designed for a five-string bass.

“I brought those patterns to James and it was an instant fit. In retrospect, there are elements of that headstock that actually mirror the Metallica logo – it’s funny how things in the cosmos line up.

“I went to his house with some wood. A friend had started bringing in some really interesting woods from Central America. I took a couple of boards of Chechen and some Grenadillo fretboard material to show him. He said, ‘Well, let’s do it with this one, but let’s stash that one.’

“That was one of those moments where I realized I’d better do a good job on the first one if I wanted to have a second one happen. We got through it, and it turned out even better than either of us expected. It’s been great – he’s a really cool guy and he’s got some really cool ideas. We’re up to seven, and I think he might be pondering an eighth.

“It’s funny to be doing it, because I don’t really play guitar very well. But my intuition with what I do with the basses has transferred very well over to the guitars.”

For instance?

“There are fine details when you get into what a really accomplished player wants an instrument to do. I can do that with a bass, but I don’t play guitar well enough to know if I’m splitting these hairs the right way for a guitar. But the intuition of knowing how to do that with basses has served me really, really well.

“Not only James, but some other very accomplished players have given me feedback that tells me the choices I've made, and the attention I’ve given, has been all in the right direction.”

James’ Carl guitar was made of the wood from the garage from “Metallica Mansion” in El Cerrito, California, where the band lived from 1983 to 1986 and wrote Kill ’Em All and Ride the Lightning. Was that your most challenging build?

“The Carl guitar was challenging in just being able to honor the woods that James wanted to use. But the real challenge for me was with the inlays – I had to get help on them.

“I just haven’t been able to unlock the more marquetry type of inlay, where pieces are all interconnected, as well as guys like Larry Robinson. Larry’s an absolute genius at that stuff, so I had him cut the parts and I put them in.

What else was challenging about Carl?

“Just doing things in a different order because of the way the top and the head cap needed to be built. My brother Joe, who does guitar setup and repair, came up with this term, ‘headscratchers’ – he says, ‘I got a whole room full of headscratchers.’ And that’s kind of what lutherie is.

”Unless you’re doing one thing and only that one thing, you work out your system and that’s how you work. But if you’re constantly trying to grow and try new new ideas, there’s always going to be the challenge of doing it consistently, without errors. You have to find the best way through that in order to to achieve your result.”

If you could collaborate with any musician, past or present, who would it be?

“My all time hero as a player was Jaco Pastorius – but he had his thing that he did with his J basses, so I don't think there would have been a collaboration there. It’s like if people ask about your favorite Beatles song from one era; there’s no easy answer to questions like that.”

• Follow Kenneth Lawrence Instruments on Facebook.

Every aspiring band needs their big break, and for Metallica, one of their most important early milestones occurred in the early 1980s when they were invited to go on their first national tour supporting British heavy metal band, Raven.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Raven recalls how Metallica went down while on the road – and it turns out the reception they received from some of the crowds was less than ideal.

Founded in 1974 in Newcastle, England, by brothers Mark and John Gallagher, the ‘new wave of British heavy metal’ group were promoting their third album, All For One, in 1983.

For the supporting tour, they brought along Metallica – a band they perceived to be “a more refined Motörhead”. But not everyone was as enthusiastic about their music as they were.

“We came out to do our first tour of the States, and our management was the same as Metallica’s,” guitarist Mark Gallagher explains. “They were just starting out, and [Megaforce Records founder] Jonny Z [Jon Zazula], who was our manager at the time, said, ‘I’ve got the biggest band on the West Coast from San Francisco. They’re gonna open for you.’ We were like, ‘Really? Who’s that?’”

For bass player John Gallagher, the weight of Zazula’s statement wasn’t lost on him.

“When you thought of the big bands in San Francisco, it’s a long list,” he says. “I mean… there was Y&T and even Journey, but no, it was Metallica. We were like, ‘Who?’ So, they said, ‘We’ll send you a cassette.’”

When the cassette arrived, the band’s warp-speed playing left them scratching their heads.

“I put it in, played it, and I’m going, ‘Does this sound like it’s at the right speed?’” John goes on. “It kind of sounded like if you put a Motörhead album on at 78 RPM, you know?”

“We kind of dug it,” his brother takes over. “We thought it was like a more refined Motörhead, like, real kickass. But when we went out and played the shows, a lot of places didn’t like Metallica. They were like, ‘What the hell is this?’

“Other than the major markets, we played some nutty places on that tour, like Bald Knob, Arkansas, and some really weird gigs,” he concludes. “The whole thing was quite an experience.”

Even though Motörhead were already well established by the early ’80s, the velocity of Metallica’s riffs caught many by surprise. History dictates, however, that the music world would quickly grow accustomed to their sound, and following the release of 1986’s Master of Puppets, they soon became one of the biggest metal bands in the world.

The full interview with Raven will be published on the Guitar World website in the near future.

In related news, James Hetfield’s luthier has detailed his journey from crafting basses to becoming the Metallica guitarist's go-to axe maker.

Luthier Ken Lawrence has been equipping one of the biggest names in metal, James Hetfield, with some truly iconic axes for the best part of three decades – most famously ‘Carl’, which was made out of wood from Metallica's ’80s home.

But the famed guitar builder is in fact a bassist – and managed to win over the Metallica guitarist with basses before clinching a guitar commission.

Speaking to Guitar World about how their collaboration first came about, Lawrence recalls meeting Doug West, Mesa/Boogie founder Randall Smith's right-hand man, as the one who set it all in motion.

“I met Doug West from Mesa/Boogie, and we hit it off. We became fast friends. At the time, I was still making basses, primarily,” he explains. “I spent a lot of time down at Mesa's shop playing music with Doug and I would leave instruments there for them to show to whomever might be stopping by.

“Doug took one of those basses over to a Metallica rehearsal where they were working on their guitar rigs. This is when Jason Newsted [former Metallica bassist] was in the band, just to see if Jason might be interested.”

It was Hetfield who ended up checking Lawrence's basses out and admiring his workmanship. In fact, “He kept flipping it back and forth, studying it. Then he asked if we could meet.” There was one problem, though: since Lawrence was still primarily focusing on basses, he didn't have a single guitar to show him.

“I had showed up auditioning for a guitar commission with a carload of basses! I laid them all out on the floor, and he walked in and went, ‘OK, let's make a guitar.’ So that's how that all started. It's been great.’”

The first guitar that Lawrence ever built for him was an Explorer-style model, inspired by one of Hetfield’s older ESPs.

“He said that this was one that he plays a lot. He really likes one, if you can get close to this, then we're doing something. That was one of those little moments where I realized that I better do a good job on this first one if I want to have a second one happen. We got through it, and it turned out even better than either of us expected.”

As to what else we can expect from the James Hetfield/Ken Lawrence collaboration, the luthier answers coyly, “I mean, he's a really cool guy, and he's got some really cool ideas. We're up to seven, and I think he might be pondering an eighth. I'm not sure – fingers crossed!”

Jerry Cantrell took part in a fan Q&A in the newest issue of Metal Hammer, during which he teased the possibility of a high-profile collaboration with another big-name player in heavy music: James Hetfield.

The Alice in Chains electric guitar star is no stranger to impromptu partnerships, and over the years has sporadically joined forces with Metallica specifically for a suite of collaborations.

In 1998, he featured on Metallica’s take on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Tuesday’s Gone, which dropped as part of the band’s Garage Inc cover album, and on stage he’s linked up with Hetfield and co at a number of benefit concerts.

And, when quizzed over whether he and Hetfield would revive their partnership any time soon – be that for a one-off single or a fully fledged album – Cantrell refused to rule it out, revealing the pair have already been jamming together and discussed it... sort of.

“James and I have talked about it, kind of,” Cantrell responds. “We never had a formal conversation but I’ve jammed with him at Kirk [Hammett, Metallica guitarist]’s place.

“I’ve even spent a night or two at his house, and we’ve ended up with guitars in the kitchen and on the porch. It’s something I’d be really curious about, even to just write a song with him.

“As for whether it’d turn into something more than that, he’s got a pretty demanding day job. Ha ha! So I’d understand if it never comes to be.”

That doesn’t sound like a definitive ‘no’ to our ears, but unfortunately it’s still a far cry from an official confirmation of a future team-up.

Nevertheless, Cantrell’s enthusiasm is quite clearly there, and such enthusiasm is further bolstered by the fact the grunge hero has previously gone on record to voice his admiration for the Metallica frontman.

In fact, in a separate interview with Metal Hammer from 2020, Cantrell named Hetfield the greatest frontman in metal.

“As a guitarist, I come from the Malcolm Young school of rock, which is about rhythm and songwriting,” he said. “If you talk to anybody, I’m not really known as a virtuoso soloist. Where it’s at for me is rhythm, tone, feel and arrangement. I think James comes from that school too.

“What makes James such a great frontman is his physical presence. Nobody else commands the same kind of respect and attention without it being self-seeking or egocentric.

“Will he go down in history as a rock icon? He already has – he’s the godfather, man.”

Visit Magazines Direct to pick up the new issue of Metal Hammer.

Given the band's success and the resources at their disposal, it remains remarkable that Metallica have had not one, but two, albums with enormously controversial mixes.

The more recent of the two was on 2003's St. Anger, which was a polarizing album even without its famous ‘metal trash can lid’ snare drum sound. The other came 15 years before, on, 1988's ...And Justice for All.

Though Metallica were on a sharp upward trajectory while recording the latter album – indeed, it would mark their debut on MTV and in the upper echelons of the Billboard charts – it was nonetheless an incredibly difficult time for the band.

On September 27, 1986, Metallica lost their beloved bassist, Cliff Burton, in a horrific tour bus crash.

Aside from his remarkable abilities on the bass itself, Burton had hugely influenced the band's musical direction.

“[Cliff] really exposed James [Hetfield] and I to a whole new musical horizon of harmonies and melodies,” recounted Lars Ulrich in a 2008 Guitar World interview. “[Our] whole way of writing songs together was very much shaped around Cliff’s musical input.”

After a period of mourning, the band auditioned dozens of new bassists, eventually settling on Jason Newsted. The wound from Burton's death, however, was still incredibly raw.

“There was a lot of anguish after Cliff died, and basically Jason was the punching bag,” guitarist Kirk Hammett told Guitar World. “We vented so much on him, and it wasn’t really fair.”

The band's first album with Newsted, ...And Justice for All was marked by the band's increasingly progressive and technically intricate bent – and nearly inaudible bass parts.

With the band's tough-edged, hard-drinking reputation, the bizarre mixing decision was long assumed to be an elaborate way of hazing their newest member.

James Hetfield, however, maintains that this was not the case.

“The bass [on ...And Justice for All] was obscured for two reasons,” Hetfield told Guitar World. “First, Jason tended to double my rhythm guitar parts, so it was hard to tell where my guitar started and his bass left off. Also, my tone on Justice was very scooped – all lows and highs, with very little midrange.

“When my rhythm parts were placed in the mix, my guitar sound ate up all the lower frequencies. Jason and I were always battling for the same space in the mix.”

Speaking to Guitar World at the same time, Newsted said simply of the situation, “I can’t explain how much grief I dealt with – and still deal with – over that record.”

Last week, Gibson CEO Cesar Gueikian shared the latest progress update on a long-term project he’d been teasing on his Instagram over the past number of weeks – a mystery electric guitar dubbed CEO2, which bears a striking resemblance to James Hetfield’s ‘So What’ Explorer.

At the time, we theorized that CEO2 was being created as a gift for the Metallica frontman – a theory that was further supported by the fact that Gueikian himself was engaging with comments suggesting that would be the case.

However, that all proved to be the ultimate red herring, because CEO2’s owner has been officially revealed… and it’s not James Hetfield. Instead, it’s been given to Hollywood A-lister Jason Momoa.

The Aquaman star announced his latest high-profile Gibson in a new post on Instagram, in which he revealed he wanted to acquire CEO2 as a birthday present for his 16-year-old son, with whom he shares a deep affection for Metallica’s music.

“When the universe is listening, moments like this happen,” Momoa writes. “In my heart, I’ve been searching for an Explorer just like Papa Het’s – something that would make my son freak out. I raised him on @metallica.

“With no intention whatsoever, my hermano @gueikian was making a very special @gibsonguitar Explorer CEO2. Before he posted anything, I called to ask what I should get just looking for advice. He tells me, ‘Just wait, I’ve got a surprise for you. I’m making this guitar for charity.’”

The guitar Guiekian had in mind was the soon-to-be-completed CEO2, which, based on the images shared online, looked nailed-on to be a gift for James Hetfield.

After all, it was clearly created as an homage to Hetfield’s famed 1984 Explorer, which featured a white finish and ‘So What’ scrawled on the body. The CEO2, meanwhile, featured the same finish, and Gueikian’s catchphrase – ‘Do Epic Shit’ – embossed in place of the ‘So What’ tag.

The guitar’s build was mysteriously documented across a number of posts, and Momoa was keeping a keen eye on proceedings, all too aware what the outcome would be.

“As I slowly saw the process unfold on Instagram, I was truly blown away. I was there the first time Cesar painted his first guitar,” continues Momoa, who received the new guitar after he and his son watched Metallica live together for the first time.

“To see all of this come full circle, watch METALLICA for the first time with my children, and now give my son a handmade guitar from the CEO of Gibson, who just happens to be mi hermano, is enough to make this big toughy tear up.

“HAPPY 16th BIRTHDAY, MY LIL WILD ANIMAL. PAPA LOVES YOU. Now start shredding and melting faces. Forever thankful. Love you, CESAR.”

It is the latest notable Gibson that Momoa has purchased in recent years. The well-known guitar fan – who also plays in his own band – previously bought the last Murphy Lab “Greeny” Les Paul.

So, it’s a heartwarming end to the mysterious tale of the CEO2, but we can’t help but feel there are still questions that need to be answered. When everybody thought this was a gift for Hetfield, it was speculated that the Explorer would precipitate the production of some formal James Hetfield Gibson signature guitars.

Will that still happen, and is Gibson still planning to work with Hetfield on new releases? It seems less assured now, but never say never.

Last Friday (December 13), Metallica maintained tradition by hosting their annual All Within My Hands Foundation event, which saw the heavy metal legends tap a host of special guests – and eyebrow-raising electric guitars – to perform a range of covers, deep cuts, and reimagined fan favorites.

Over the 13-song setlist, Metallica delivered both acoustic and electric sets, with lesser-played tracks getting air time, and an intriguing cast of guest musicians helping punctuate the evening's festivities.

While some tracks got live debuts and others were dusted off for their first showing in nearly 30 years, it was perhaps Hetfield’s decision to sling an oddball Danelectro Long Horn Baritone over his shoulder for a rendition of Fuel that especially stood out.

With a street price of around $550, the Long Horn isn’t exactly a wallet-thinner, but with its lengthy 29.75" scale and B-to-B tuning, it’s arguably not your archetypal trasher. However, Hetfield used it to help Metallica break out of the key of E, as they gave Fuel a heavier run-out in the key of B.

Fuel followed an impromptu guitar solo from Hetfield as he showcased his new Danelectro’s low twang. Hammett’s bonus harmonies, via a single pickup Fender Esquire, are a treat, too.

Pearl Jam bass player Jeff Ament was the most high-profile guest of the evening, featuring on a fresh take of the primal trash classic, Hit The Lights. With Robert Trujillo still playing a part – rather than simply sitting one out – Ament helped give the band’s heavy metal thunder plenty of extra oomph.

Metallica’s acoustic set had plenty to delight, too, with Low Man's Lyric reportedly getting its first live performance since 1998 (according to SetlistFM). That was followed by a live debut for their take on Bachman-Turner Overdrive's Away From Home, and a world-first acoustic rendition of If Darkness Had a Son from the Grammy-nominated 72 Seasons. They were joined by sibling strings duo SistaStrings, comprising cello and violin, for extra spice.

Hammett wielded a Fender Acoustasonic, and Robert Trujillo a Tele-style acoustic bass, for the performance as the band capitalized on the chance to arm themselves with atypical axes.

The lead guitarist also made full use of his Acoustasonic’s electro-acoustic specs by testing its soloing credentials before the band concluded their acoustic set with the superlative Nothing Else Matters.

San Francisco multi-instrumentalist Avi Vinocur of Goodnight, Texas featured extensively across both sets, wielding everything from mandolins and acoustic guitars to a black and gold Les Paul for Fuel. Taking to Instagram afterward, he purred, “Well, yesterday was nuts.”

The Unforgiven II, the sequel to a Black Album masterstroke, was played for the first time since 2015, with the band wrapping up the night with Master of Puppets. Hetfield’s iconic white Gibson Flying V and Hammett’s prized "Greeny" Les Paul also featured, standing as more typical guitar picks.

Billy Corgan has issued a cheeky call-out to James Hetfield while highlighting apparent similarities between a Smashing Pumpkins deep cut and a Metallica song that came out two years later.

On a new episode of the Everblack Podcast, Corgan speaks highly of Metallica’s resident electric guitar riffsmith, and discusses the suspicious sonic resemblance between Tales Of A Scorched Earth from 1995’s Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, and ’Tallica’s Fuel, which arrived on Reload two years later.

“Let me caveat this by saying that I love James Hetfield as a person, [and] I love Metallica,” Corgan stresses. “I saw them in 1984 and all that great stuff. James is probably the greatest riff writer outside of maybe Tony Iommi, James has written some of the greatest, most amazing riffs, and he’s still writing them.

“But,” he goes on, “if you listen to Tales Of A Scorched Earth and you listen to that Metallica song [Fuel], ‘Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.’ See – a little lightbulb went off in your brain… Now, which song came first?”

He has a point. The main riffs of the two songs have plenty in common, but both were timely compositions, replicating the gritty hard rock/metal sound that most bands of the mid-late ’90s were pedaling.

As such, Corgan clearly isn’t accusing Hetfield of stealing from him – unlike how Hammett openly admitted to stealing the Batman riff for 72 Seasons.

“I don’t think James would rip anything off from me,” Corgan expands. “But the first time I heard that song, I was, like, ‘That’s awfully close.’ But I love me some James. And I’d love somebody trying to get a troll headline out of that, some clickbait out of that.” We hear you, Billy.

Corgan adds that similarities between different riffs will always inevitably occur because of the guitar’s basic limitations. Echoing a lesson his father once taught him, he says: “My father used to say, ‘Look, there’s only 12 notes.’ So, that’s the great thing. We all rip each other off, and if it works, great.

“I’ve got no problem with that,” he concludes. “I mean, I’ve certainly ripped Metallica off plenty.”

Corgan has been in fine headline-grabbing form lately. Not too long ago, he bemoaned the “silly lists” compiling the greatest guitar players, saying he's always ranked lower than those “I could play circles around.”

It was in Los Angeles almost 30 years ago that Lars Ulrich, a teenage tennis prodigy turned drummer, first jammed with James Hetfield, a guitarist and singer from the nearby SoCal neighborhood of Downey.

At the time, a none-too-impressed Hetfield figured that first session to be their last. He was, of course, very wrong. As the backbone of Metallica, Hetfield and Ulrich have gone on to perform countless times for millions of fans around the world and to sell many millions of albums.

All of this would not have been possible without the major players who have passed through the band’s ranks over the years, among them guitarist Dave Mustaine, bassist Jason Newsted, and, perhaps most crucial, the late, great bassist Cliff Burton. But no single musician has been beside Hetfield and Ulrich longer than lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who joined Metallica prior to the recording of their 1983 debut, Kill ’Em All, and whose quick-fingered, melodic soloing is an indispensable element of the band’s sound to this day.

Currently rounded out by bassist Robert Trujillo, Metallica recently released their ninth studio effort, Death Magnetic. The album is being hailed as a return to the band’s thrash metal roots, which makes this an ideal moment to tell the story of those trailblazing early days.

In this exclusive oral history, Hetfield, Hammett, and Ulrich, along with some friends and former band mates, look back on Metallica’s first decade, and recount the recording of their classic first five albums. Through the eyes of those who saw it, heard it, and helped to create the timeless music, Guitar World charts Metallica’s rise from L.A. thrash upstarts to reigning biggest heavy metal band in the world.

In the Beginning

In 1980, 16-year-old Lars Ulrich moves with his family from his native Denmark to Los Angeles. Inspired by Deep Purple and New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts like Diamond Head, Saxon, and Motörhead, Ulrich puts down his tennis racket, picks up a pair of drumsticks, and decides to form a band. Among the first people he meets after moving to L.A. is Brian Slagel, a Southern California teen who would go on to found the independent record label Metal Blade.

Brian Slagel: “Lars would always say, ‘I’m going to start a band one day,’ and I’d be like, ‘Sure man, whatever.’

“He had this little drum set in the corner of his bedroom, but it wasn’t even set up. I’d always laugh when I saw it because it was just a big mess. But when I started putting together Metal Massacre [the Metal Blade compilation of local, unsigned metal bands] Lars came to me and said, ‘If I get a band together, can I be on the album?’ Since he was a good friend I said, ‘Absolutely.’”

In the summer of 1980, Ulrich places a classified ad in SoCal paper The Recycler: “Drummer looking for other musicians to jam with – Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head, Iron Maiden.” Guitarist James Hetfield is among the respondents.

James Hetfield: “The first time Lars and I got together to jam, it just didn’t happen. There was no vibe. But he introduced me to a whole new world of heavy music. I had heard of Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, but not too many of the other, more obscure English metal bands.

“I would spend days just going through his record collection, taping over my REO Speedwagon cassettes with bands like Angel Witch and Diamond Head and Motörhead. I was in heaven at his house.”

Slagel: “When Lars heard about the Metal Massacre compilation I was putting together, the two of them recorded Hit the Lights on a little Fostex cassette, and they had their friend, Lloyd Grant, who was a guitar teacher, come in and do the lead.”

Hetfield: “Lars came to me with the opportunity to be on a record, and that was pretty interesting. At that point in my life I wanted to play music. I didn’t want to work.”

Ulrich steals the name Metallica from friend and radio DJ Ron Quintana, who had mentioned it as a possible title for a fanzine he was preparing to launch. Ulrich and Hetfield recruit bassist Ron McGovney, who had played with Hetfield previously in the band Leather Charm, and lead guitarist Dave Mustaine to fill out the band’s lineup.

Dave Mustaine: “Before the [first] rehearsal, I went to Lars’ house, and he played me the tape of Hit the Lights. I said, ‘This song sucks. You need more guitar solos.’ And Lars went, ‘Oh fuck, reeeeaaallly?’

“I convinced him that I should be in the band and went to rehearsal. I was tuning up when all the other guys went into another room. They weren’t talking to me, so I went in and said, ‘What the fuck? Am I in the band or not?’ And they said, ‘You’ve got the gig.’ It was as easy as that.”

Kerry King: (Slayer guitarist) “I remember seeing Dave play with Metallica at the Woodstock in Anaheim [California]. He was ripping these killer solos and riffs, and he was just glaring at the crowd – not even looking at his fingers. I was blown away.”

In the spring of 1982, the Hetfield-Ulrich-Mustaine-McGovney lineup records a four-song demo with a new version of Hit the Lights. The tape comes to be known as the “Power Metal” demo due to business cards McGovney prints up with the phrase at the time.

Ron McGovney: “Lars said, ‘What did you do! What the hell is ‘power metal’? I can’t believe you did such a stupid thing!’ He was so pissed off at me.”

In late 1982, while trying to replace McGovney, Ulrich and Hetfield spot bassist Cliff Burton onstage with his band, Trauma, at the Whisky a Go Go in L.A. The two ask him to join Metallica. Burton agrees, on the condition that the band relocate to his hometown of San Francisco.

Slagel: “Metallica had a lot of problems in L.A. because all the club owners thought they were either too heavy or too punk. They went over so much better in San Francisco than they ever did in their hometown.”

Gary Holt: (Exodus guitarist) “When they first came to the Bay Area, L.A. was known for nothing more than a lot of shit bands. And then here comes this band, and we’re all into the same stuff – Diamond Head, Budgie… Metallica came along and started playing everywhere.”

Prior to Burton’s joining, Metallica had recorded the No Life ’Til Leather demo, which featured much of the material that would eventually comprise Kill ’Em All. The demo becomes a hot item on the underground tape-trading circuit.

Holt: “The tape-trading scene was how we all got heard. You would record a demo and the traders would circulate it all over the world – to all the fans, the magazines, and the independent record labels.”

King: “Metallica’s demo got passed around, big time. We all had that.”

Scott Ian: (Anthrax guitarist) “When I heard No Life ‘Til Leather I immediately thought, ‘Wow, here’s some guys from the other side of the country that are doing the same thing we’re doing; they’re just a little better at it right now.’

“I remember being there the day Jonny Z [Jon Zazula, owner of New Jersey record store Rock N’ Roll Heaven and founder of indie label Megaforce Records] got it in the mail. He put it on, and I was like, ‘That’s fucking killer! Who are these guys?’ Jonny told me, ‘They’re called Metallica, and I’m bringing them to New York. Somehow we’re gonna make a record.’”

Jonny Z: “We hustled together $1,500 for them to rent a van to come out to the East Coast and play some shows.”

Metallica set up shop at the Music Building in Queens, New York, where Anthrax practice as well. The band live and rehearse at the space and play their first East Coast gigs.

Ian: “Metallica were opening for Vandenberg [the group guitarist Adrian Vandenberg led prior to joining Whitesnake] at L’amour in Brooklyn, and we were all down there in the afternoon, waiting for them to soundcheck. Mustaine was already shitfaced by 3:30, and he was yelling at Adrian Vandenberg, ‘Get the fuck off the stage! You suck!’ And we were all like, ‘What the fuck, dude? Shhhh!’”

Slagel: “Everybody liked to drink back then and have a good time, but Dave could go much further over the line than anyone else would, and you could see that sooner or later that was going to be a problem.”

Ian: “I showed up at the Music Building for band practice one day, and Cliff was outside smoking a cigarette. He told me they had just kicked Dave out of the band. The other guys said, ‘We had known we were gonna do it for weeks now. We woke him up this morning, and he was so drunk and hungover that before he could even realize what was going on we got him out of here.’

“I asked them what they were going to do, and they said they already had another guy on his way into town. His name was Kirk Hammett, and he was the guitar player in Exodus.”

Kirk Hammett: “I was familiar with Metallica’s music before I joined the band. I had the No Life ‘Til Leather demo, and my friends and I listened to it quite a bit. It was what everyone in the San Francisco underground metal scene was listening to in 1982. Plus, Exodus played with Metallica pretty often in San Francisco.

“The first time I spoke to Lars was after they had just finished a set and I said, ‘Thanks for letting us play. I really like you guys.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, cool, cool,’ but as I was talking to him, he started taking his stage clothes off, and before I knew it he was just completely naked in front of me, and I was just shocked. I said to myself, ‘Oh, he’s European. Europeans do stuff like this.’”

Lars Ulrich: “I remember the first time I heard Kirk. He had a feel that very few young players have – very rooted in European metal. It was really nice to hear an American guy who didn’t play like Eddie Van Halen.”

Kill ’Em All

In the spring of 1983, Metallica travel to Music America Studios in Rochester, New York, to record their debut album, Kill ’Em All, with producer Paul Curcio.

Hammett: “We totally trashed the place. I felt bad. But it’s four guys, you know? There was carpet in every single room, and we drank pretty much 24 hours a day back then. So you can imagine how that turned out. Moist places shouldn’t have rugs.”

Ulrich: “The actual studio was in the basement of this huge old colonial-type of clubhouse. On the second floor there was a huge ballroom; perfect for getting a good drum sound. The problem was the place was fucking haunted. My cymbals would start spinning for no reason. Shit like that. It was scary.”

Hetfield: “Occasionally we put guitar and bass amps in the [ballroom] for ambience. I remember Cliff being in that room with all his amps and his headphones on while he recorded (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth, his bass solo. He literally was just standing in front of his amps.”

Hammett: “The guitar stuff was recorded through James’ magical, mythical Marshall. He had it modified by some guy in L.A. who used to work on Eddie Van Halen’s gear. I used it too, because we didn’t have much equipment back then. I also used a wah pedal and a Boss Super Distortion. James played his white Flying V, and I used my black Flying V. Those were the only guitars we had.”

Hammett, who has only been in the band a few months, still has to contend with the looming presence of Dave Mustaine, who had written many of the riffs and solos to the songs.

Hammett: “Jonny Z said, ‘You know, you have to play Dave’s solos.’” I said, “‘No, I don’t really want to play Dave’s solos.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you play the opening to every solo, so that people think you’re going to play Dave’s solos, and then you can go somewhere else with them.’ And that’s exactly what I did.

“As a 20-year-old kid, put in a position like that, you don’t want to rock the boat too much – especially being the new guy. So I took the first four bars of most of the solos and changed them.”

Hetfield: “Dave brought the song The Four Horsemen over from one of his other bands. Back then it was called The Mechanix. After he left Metallica, we kind of fixed the song up. The lyrics he used were pretty silly.”

Kill ’Em All is released on July 25, 1983, on Megaforce. Though the first wave of thrash bands, including Exodus, Slayer, Anthrax, and Overkill, are up and running, Metallica are the first act to record and release a full-length vinyl album.

Hetfield: “It was Cliff who named the album. Originally we were supposed to call it ‘Metal Up Your Ass.’ We got a phone call from our manager telling us half the record outlets wouldn’t carry the album if it was called that. Cliff said, ‘You know what? Fuck those fuckers, man. We should just kill ’em all.’”

Hammett: “After we recorded the album and we came back to the Bay Area, there seemed to be 10 or 12 newer bands that were playing faster, really aggressive beats.”

David Ellefson: (former Megadeth bassist) “I remember early on Dave [Mustaine] got a fan letter from some kid in the Bay Area who wrote, ‘Can’t wait to hear your new stuff. Hope it’s faster than Metallica.’ We went to rehearsal the next day and everything jumped up 50 beats per minute!”

Hammett: “Part of the reason why we would play so fast is because we were just nervous. As a young musician, when I was nervous I had a tendency to speed things up. Joining Metallica, I thought, ‘This is great, because it can never be too fast.’”

Hetfield: “Lars was always nervous onstage, so he’d play faster and faster. Nobody wanted to wimp out and tell him. We just figured, ‘Hell, we’ll just play fast, too,’ and that’s what we did on the record.”

Hammett: “I would have been happy selling [a few] copies and being able to do a club tour across the States. To me, that was success. Then when we found out we were actually going to go to Europe and play shows there for the first time – I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s totally unexpected.’

“For James and Cliff and myself, we had never been outside the United States. It was all very inspiring, because there were more possibilities out there than we imagined at the onset.”

Ian: “Jonny Z had been trying to land Metallica a deal, and all the guys at the big labels would put their fingers in their ears when he played them the album. They were clueless. But when they saw how many copies Jonny sold, they realized, ‘Wow, there’s thousands of kids out there who are into this shit.’”

Jonny Z: “We printed up 1,500 copies, and they went in five seconds. We printed another 3,500, and they went in a week. We just kept on building and building, and then Elektra picked them up for Ride the Lightning.”

Ride the Lightning

After completing a European tour opening for Venom in early 1984, Metallica travel to Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark, to record their second album, with producer Flemming Rasmussen.

The result, Ride the Lightning, is issued on Megaforce on July 27. A few months later, after a gig in New York City, the band is signed by Elektra, making them the first thrash metal act to be picked up by a major label. Elektra then reissues Ride the Lightning in the fall of 1984.

Ulrich: “Cliff was responsible for a lot of the things that happened between Kill ’Em All and Ride the Lightning. He really exposed James and I to a whole new musical horizon of harmonies and melodies. [Our] whole way of writing songs together was very much shaped around Cliff’s musical input.”

Hetfield: “Touring definitely made us a little more worldly. We started to see other things that were going on in the world. And that’s when more of the punk-oriented, opinionated kind of thoughts began to appear in our lyrics. And actually having to sit down and write an album made a difference, because Kill ’Em All was just songs we had been playing in clubs for the two years before we recorded it.”

Hammett: “I tracked the whole album with Marshall amps and my Gibson Flying V, and by then James had his Gibson Explorer.”

Hetfield: “That whole album was a real huge step for us. Creeping Death was our first big, chanting, gang-vocal thing. There was almost some production value to it!”

Hammett: “When we did the crunchy ‘Die by my hand’ breakdown in the middle, we sat in the control room after we did the gang vocals, and everyone was just going nuts!”

In addition to thrashy cuts like Creeping Death, Fight Fire with Fire, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the album features the song Fade to Black, which many consider the first thrash-metal ballad.

Slagel: “Metallica really pushed the boundaries with Fade to Black. That was the first time any of the bands tried something like that. I remember some of their hardcore fans accused them of selling out with that song, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s just a great, extremely well-written tune.”

Hetfield: “It’s a suicide song, and we got a lot of flack for it; kids were killing themselves because of the song. But we also got hundreds and hundreds of letters from kids telling us how they related to the song and that it made them feel better. It was also pretty much our first ballad, so it was challenging, and we knew it would freak people out.”

Hammett: “For the extended solo at the end I wasn’t sure what to play. We had been in Denmark for five or six months, and I was getting really homesick. Since it was a somber song and we were all bummed out anyway, I thought of some depressing things when I did the solo – and it really helped!

“When that was finished, I went back and did the clean guitar parts behind the verse. James played an arpeggiated figure while I arpeggiated three-note chords. We ended up getting a very Dire Straits–type of sound.”

Hetfield: “Bands like Exodus and Slayer don’t do ballads, but they’ve stuck themselves in that position, which is something we’ve never wanted to do. Limiting yourself to please your audience is bullshit.”

With the support of Elektra, Metallica begin to make inroads to the mainstream. Throughout 1984 and 1985 the band tour the world, embarking on the ‘Bang the Head That Doesn’t Bang’ tour across Europe and playing the U.S. with W.A.S.P. and Armored Saint.

In August of 1985, Metallica appear at the Day on the Green festival in Oakland, California, where they perform before an audience of 60,000. That same month, they play to more than 70,000 at the Monsters of Rock festival in Donington, England, where they’re sandwiched on the bill between Ratt and Bon Jovi.

Hetfield: (onstage at Monsters of Rock) “If you came here to see spandex, eye makeup, and the words ‘Oh baby’ in every fuckin' song, this ain't the fuckin' band.”

Master of Puppets

After touring for much of the year, Metallica return to Sweet Silence Studios in September 1985, to begin work on their third album, Master of Puppets, again with Flemming Rasmussen at the helm.

Hammett: “By that point, we had been playing together for a few years. We’d toured a ton; we knew each other musically and personally; everybody was contributing amazing ideas, and it was just a culmination of all the right spots and all the right notes at the right time. Maybe the planets were aligned or something, I don’t know, but that’s what it felt like.”

Hetfield: “We started getting into the longer, more orchestrated songs. It was more of a challenge to write a long song that didn’t seem long.”

Hammett: “I’ll tell you how the main [descending] riff to Master of Puppets came about. On the Ride the Lightning tour, James would always play the riff in the dressing room, but on the D string, and I’d play it simultaneously on the G string as a parallel-fourths harmony line. It sounded really dorky and funny.

“Then, one day at rehearsal, James said, ‘Let me show you this really heavy song intro,’ and proceeded to play that exact riff on the low E string. I said, ‘Ah, so you finally found a use for that dorky little thing!’ It’s anything but dorky now.”

Hetfield: “The riff for the title track was pretty messy – constantly moving. But it works good live. People love to scream Master! a couple of times.”

Hammett: “I used a Mesa/Boogie Mark II-C head and my Jackson Randy Rhoads V on that song. When you listen to the solo, there’s this weird sound right after the mellow part where it sounds like I’m hitting a super high note, like I’m fretting the string against the pickup.

“What happened was, I accidentally pulled the string off the fretboard, and it fretted out on the side of the neck! I heard it back and was like, ‘That’s brilliant! We’ve gotta keep that!’ Of course, I’ve never been able to reproduce it since.”

Master of Puppets is released on March 3, 1986. In addition to the epic title track, the album features incredibly aggressive material like Battery, Damage, Inc., and Disposable Heroes, as well as a second ballad, Welcome Home (Sanitarium).

A Sticker that appeared on the cover of early pressings of Master of Puppets read: “The only track you probably won't want to play is Damage, Inc. due to the multiple uses of the infamous ‘F’ word. Otherwise, there aren't any ‘Shits,’ ‘Fucks,’ ‘Pisses,’ ‘Cunts,’ ‘Motherfuckers,’ or ‘Cocksuckers’ anywhere on this record.”

Hetfield: “The idea for Welcome Home (Sanitarium) came from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Fade to Black worked well, and we wanted to have another slow, clean, picking type of song, this time with a chorus. I had trouble singing that chorus – it’s really high. And the riff for the song was lifted from some other band, who shall remain anonymous.”

Master of Puppets peaks at #29 on the Billboard album chart, and within a few months of its release sells more than 500,000 copies. With no help from radio or MTV, Metallica earn their first Gold-certified album. The band receive a large amount of mainstream exposure from their opening slot on Ozzy Osbourne’s tour in support of his Ultimate Sin album.

Hammett: “Going on the Ozzy tour really made a difference, because all of a sudden we were playing Master of Puppets to a pretty mainstream audience. Your typical Ozzy fan might not have gotten Metallica, but two or three years later, they were all saying, ‘Yeah, I saw Metallica with Ozzy, and they blew him away!’

“We converted people night after night. Suddenly we were selling albums, and a lot of it had to do with playing our asses off, putting on a great show, just bringing the music to the people in that way, because radio wasn’t having us.”

In the fall of ’86, Metallica embark on the European leg of the ‘Damage, Inc.’ tour, with Anthrax supporting.

Dan Spitz: (Anthrax guitarist) “The aura each night when they got onstage was incredible. I imagine Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath had that same vibe. Seeing Metallica back then, you just knew something big was about to happen. Master of Puppets was the changing of the guard.”

On September 27, while en route to a gig in Copenhagen, Metallica’s tour bus skids off the road near Dorarp, Sweden, and flips over several times. Cliff Burton, asleep in his bunk, is thrown through a window. The bus falls on top of him, killing him instantly. He was 24 years old.

Hetfield: “I saw the bus lying right on him. I saw his legs sticking out. I went to pieces. The driver tried to take Cliff’s blanket to give that to someone else. I just screamed, ‘Fuck that!’ I wanted to kill the guy. I didn’t know if he was drunk or if the bus had skidded on ice. All I knew was Cliff was dead.”

Hammett: “A part of Metallica was lost forever when he died.”

Hetfield: “The only thing I could think was: ‘The band? No way! There ain’t no band. The band is not the band right now. It’s just three guys.’”

Ian: “It was a terrible time. You just don’t imagine something like that happening to one of your friends, especially when you’re on tour, because there’s this feeling of invincibility. But I know that the rest of Metallica never considered ending the band. Their attitude was, ‘Why would we stop? That’s the last thing Cliff would want us to do.’”

A few weeks after Burton’s funeral, Hetfield, Ulrich, and Hammett begin auditioning bass players. They eventually settle on 23-year-old Flotsam and Jetsam bassist Jason Newsted.

Ulrich: “We did about 60 people in one week. And we decided that we wanted to ask four back. Jason was second of the four. We played all day, and then went out for a meal. And then we went for the big test, which was the drink test.

“Somehow, I swear it wasn’t planned, me, Kirk, and James ended up in the toilet together, pissing. So we’re standing there at three in the morning, out of our faces, all of us in a line, not saying anything. And I just said without looking at anybody, ‘That’s him, right?’ And the other guys said, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ And that was it.”

Jason Newsted: “When I came into Metallica, I had to do justice to Cliff’s work, but I also had to put my own signature on it. No one could be Cliff Burton; Cliff Burton was the Jimi Hendrix of bass. I had to practice, practice, practice to get anywhere close to where he was.”

Holt: “After all these years, anyone who plays bass in Metallica is still filling Cliff Burton’s shoes. There was nobody like him.”

With Newsted onboard, Metallica head back out to the road, touring America and Europe with Metal Church, and ending with three shows as part of the Monsters of Rock festival. In the summer of 1987, they return to L.A. and record The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited. The set features covers of songs by Metallica favorites the Misfits, Budgie, and NWOBHM legends Diamond Head.

Hammett: “We did that EP for the fans, just for fun, and Elektra loved it and released it. All the lead parts flowed really quickly; I did them in two nights. That was when I first started using ESP guitars with EMG pickups.”

Hetfield: “We were still dealing with Cliff’s death, and Q-Prime, our management, was telling us to jump right back into it and start playing again. I guess we kind of mourned through music and doing the cover songs on that album.”

…And Justice for All

In January 1988, Metallica reconvene with producer Flemming Rasmussen, this time at One On One Studios in Los Angeles, to begin work on their fourth full-length album.

Titled …And Justice for All, the effort is the most progressive and technically challenging in the band’s catalog, boasting just nine songs for a combined length of more than one hour.

Hammett: “Things changed after Cliff’s death. Even our sound changed. On Justice, we kind of fell prey to that whole virtuosic, late-Eighties thing that was happening. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to be progressive and show off their abilities. Somehow, just playing fast and heavy took a backseat to that.”

Hetfield: “Sometimes we look back at some of our material and wonder how – or why – we ever came up with certain parts. There was a lot of urgency to that material, but a lot of it was just wank – just us showing off. But that’s where we were at that time.”

Though the album is Newsted’s first full-length effort with Metallica, his bass parts are almost completely inaudible on the finished product. This is widely believed to be the result of the rest of the band’s “hazing” of the bassist, though they deny the charge.

Hetfield: “The bass was obscured for two reasons. First, Jason tended to double my rhythm guitar parts, so it was hard to tell where my guitar started and his bass left off. Also, my tone on Justice was very scooped – all lows and highs, with very little midrange.

“When my rhythm parts were placed in the mix, my guitar sound ate up all the lower frequencies. Jason and I were always battling for the same space in the mix.”

Newsted: “I can’t explain how much grief I dealt with – and still deal with – over that record.”

Hammett: “There was a lot of anguish after Cliff died, and basically Jason was the punching bag. We vented so much on him, and it wasn’t really fair.”

…And Justice for All is released on September 6, 1988, and becomes Metallica’s biggest album to date. It is also their mainstream breakthrough. This is in large part due to the success of the song One, for which the band films their first music video. In the video, Hetfield’s dark lyrics are set against disturbing images from the 1971 film adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun.

Hetfield: “We’d never done a video until then because we’d never been asked to. We certainly didn’t want to get to the position where we had to beg MTV to play one of our videos.

“Our fans were calling them up and asking for our videos to be played. MTV were like, ‘Who the hell are Metallica?’ But they ended up asking us to make a video. So we finally did one, and we did it our way. And, of course, it was incredibly disturbing.”

Hammett: “I knew we were on to a good thing when I saw One on MTV at, like, 11:30 in the evening. I watched it, and afterward the VJ came on and said, ‘Wow, that’s a real bowl of rainbows!’”

In the wake of the album’s massive success – it peaks at #6 on the Billboard album chart, and is certified Platinum in less than three months – Metallica embark on ‘Damaged Justice,’ their first headlining arena tour, which takes them around the world and stretches on for more than a year.

One is also nominated for a Grammy – the first year the Recording Academy offers the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance category – but the band lose to Jethro Tull, a band whose music is neither hard rock nor metal.

Ulrich: “I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I was disappointed. Human nature is that you’d rather win than lose, but Jethro Tull walking away with it makes a huge mockery of the intentions of the event.”

A Sticker on the cover of subsequent copies of …And Justice for All reads: “Grammy Award LOSERS.”

The Black Album

After completing the ‘Damaged Justice’ tour, Metallica return to One On One Studios in October 1990 to record their fifth studio album. The music they write and record largely eschews their thrash metal roots in favor of a decidedly more commercial sound with slower tempos, simpler guitar riffs, and shorter, more accessible songs.

James Hetfield’s vocals are more melodic as well. This change in sound is credited by many to the influence of producer Bob Rock, best known for his work with radio-friendly acts like Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe.

Hetfield: “People will be saying Bob [Rock] made Metallica sound like Bon Jovi. They don’t realize that no one screws with us, except us.”

Ulrich: “One thing that Bob should be given total credit for is making James comfortable enough to take that guard down and really sing. We’ve always thought of ourselves as Big Bad Metallica, but Bob taught us a new word none of us had ever heard before: ‘soulful.’”

Hetfield: “Radio airplay wasn’t the whole idea behind our writing shorter songs. It seemed to us that we had pretty much done the longer song format to death. We had one song that has just two riffs in it, which is pretty amazing. It only takes two minutes to get the point across.”

By the time the new album is released, on August 13, 1991, Metallica have been in the studio for close to a year, and the cost of the production reaches one million dollars. They choose to title the record Metallica, though due to its stark cover image – a coiled snake against a black background – it comes to be known as the “Black Album.”

Newsted: “It took us a long time to think up that title. I guess we could have just called it ‘Five’ or named it after one of the songs. We wanted to keep it simple.”

Ulrich: “The songs aren’t so busy, and Kirk’s guitar playing fits in well when he plays with the laid-back drums. James and I tried to set things up that were easier for Kirk to solo over. Some of the things on Justice got a little out of hand. Then it was, ‘Okay, Kirk, solo over this!’ And it would be the most sideways, difficult thing.”

Newsted: “The bass sound is much weightier. I tried to create a real rhythm section rather than a one-dimensional sound. It comes down to the music – making it a real rhythm section for once, and letting the guitars do their work. I’m glad the rest of the band could tell me that that’s what was needed.”

Hetfield: “What we really wanted was a live feel. In the past, Lars and I constructed the rhythm parts without Kirk and Jason. This time I wanted to try playing as a band unit in the studio. It lightens things up and you get more of a vibe.”

Hammett: “I used a Bradshaw preamp for the lows and mids and a couple of Marshalls for the nice clean highs. We EQ’d it through the board a little bit, and it worked out great. And I used two guitars – a Strat-style ESP with two EMG [pickups] and an ’89 Les Paul Deluxe with two EMGs.”

Hetfield: “We tried a bunch of amps, but I ended up using the same Mesa/Boogie Mark II Simul Class that I’d used on the last three albums. My primary guitar was my ESP Explorer with EMGs, but I also used a Telecaster, a Gretsch White Falcon with a Bigsby, and a Guild 12-string.”

The album’s lead-off track, Enter Sandman, is propelled by a simple and hooky riff and a huge, sing-along chorus. It becomes a worldwide smash hit.

Hetfield: “I can remember when I wrote the lyrics to Enter Sandman, Bob Rock and Lars came to me and said, ‘These aren’t as good as they could be.’ And that pissed me off so much. I was like, ‘Fuck you! I’m the writer here!’ That was the first challenge from someone else, and it made me work harder.”

Hammett: “I think the time has come to reveal where I actually got the guitar lick before the breakdown in Enter Sandman: It’s from Magic Man, by Heart, but I didn’t get it from Heart’s version; I got it from a cut off Ice-T’s Power album, where he sampled it. I heard that and thought, ‘I have to snake this!’”

Mainstream music fans wholeheartedly embrace the new, friendlier Metallica. The “Black Album” enters the Billboard album chart at number one and sells 600,000 copies in its first week of release.

In addition to Enter Sandman, the record spawns five more hit singles, including The Unforgiven, Wherever I May Roam, and the acoustic ballad Nothing Else Matters. The album has since sold more than 22 million copies worldwide.

Ulrich: “You think one day some fucker’s going to tell you, ‘You have a number-one record in America’ and the whole world will ejaculate. I stood there in my hotel room, and there was this fax that said, ‘You’re number one.’ And it was like, ‘Well, okay.’ It was just another fucking fax from the office.”

Beyond the Black

In October 1991, Metallica embark on the ‘Wherever We May Roam’ tour. They stay on the road for close to three years, in the process becoming one of the biggest touring and recording acts in the world.

Over the next decade the band release a series of albums – Load, ReLoad, St. Anger – on which they continually reinvent their sound (and image), gaining – and losing – fans in the process.

In 2001, Jason Newsted leaves Metallica due to strained relations with the rest of the band, in particular James Hetfield. In 2003 he is replaced by ex–Suicidal Tendencies and Ozzy Osbourne bassist Robert Trujillo, who joins prior to the tour in support of St. Anger.

In September 2008, Metallica release their ninth studio album, Death Magnetic. To date they’ve sold more than 90 million records worldwide, and remain one of the most influential and successful bands in hard rock and heavy metal.

Hammett: “I think Metallica have a lot more to say. We’re the type of band that likes to experiment. We don’t like to stay in one spot for too long; all the albums after the ‘Black Album’ prove that. We’re not afraid to take artistic risks, even at the cost of pissing off our audience and our friends.”

Hetfield: “The cool thing about Metallica is that there’s always a new generation of angry young men who latch onto Kill ’Em All and know what I’m talking about. And maybe they grow up with the rest of the records.

“We’ve never been about creating some fantasy world with our records; we’re just documenting where we’re at at the time. There’s always going to be youth on the planet, and whether they can relate to that or not, I don’t know. But every time I look out in the crowd and see some kids battling it out in the middle of the mosh pit, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I was there, man.’”

Hammett: “We want to get out there and show people how strong Metallica are. It’s not a mask and it’s not bullshit. We feel really good about being us right now, and here we are. Now, see if you can hang on.”

This feature was originally published in the December 2008 issue of Guitar World.

Metallica fans have been asking for it for quite some time, but if a recent post from Cesar Gueikian is anything to go by, it looks as though there’s a fairly strong chance we might see some James Hetfield Gibson signature guitars very soon.

The firm’s CEO has a solid track record of teasing upcoming releases – from Murphy Lab acoustics to the Gibson Victory model – and it looks as though he’s back to his old tricks once again, having posted a new photo that sees him putting the finishing touches to a Custom Shop Explorer.

It doesn’t seem to be just any Explorer, though. Instead, the all-white, pickguard-less 1980s-flavored model looks to be something of a dead-ringer for Hetfield’s famed 1984 Explorer, with Gueikian’s ‘Do Epic Shit’ tagline delicately embossed on the body.

Those familiar with Hetfield’s Explorer will no doubt see the connection here: Hetfield’s own model has ‘So What’ scribbled in a similar position on the body in equally flourished handwriting.

And, with Gueikian further teasing that this particular custom creation (dubbed CEO2) is “almost ready and will be going to a special friend”, it seems safe to assume Hetfield will indeed be the lucky recipient of this Explorer.

Sure, there are some differences between CEO2 and the ‘So What’ Explorer – the inlays aren’t dots, for example, and the pickups don’t look like EMGs – but they can all be explained by the fact this is clearly a Custom Shop creation.

To add fuel to the hype fire, Gueikian has been actively engaging with comments that have suggested the CEO2 could be linked to Hetfield.

He’s liked a stream of comments that all acknowledge the Hetfield link, including ones that read, ‘Gotta be Papa Het,’ ‘I’ll pick this up in May when I’m down for the Metallica show,’ ‘James is gonna be so happy for hos [sic] Christmas present,’ and (perhaps the biggest giveaway of them all), ‘Is your special friend named James?’

So, it looks like CEO2 will most definitely be making its way to Hetfield, but what could that mean for the average ’Tallica fan hoping to get their hands on a Hefield Explorer?

Well, the signs suggest Hetfield and Gibson are very friendly indeed. In fact, the Metallica frontman’s fondness of Gibson is well documented: he owns a whopping five 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard ’Bursts, and a further four Golden Era Gibsons, including both a ’58 Korina Flying V and Explorer.

As such, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the two parties are working closely together behind the scenes on some upcoming guitars, and CEO2 is merely a statement creation to tie the proverbial knot of the new partnership.

It also helps that his bandmate, Kirk Hammett, is already an established signature artist for the firm, with a handful of signature Gibsons to his name – including replicas of his Greeny, 1979 Flying V and 1989 Les Paul Custom.

And, for even more evidence of the Metallica link, Gibson recently revived the Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC+ – the amp that was famously used by Hetfield and Hammett on Master of Puppets – for the first time since its launch.

Coincidence? Maybe. At the end of the day, CEO2 could just be a nice gift from Gibson, but we can’t help but feel there’s slightly more to the story here.

Whatever the case, Gueikian has teased, “Reveal coming soon,” so hopefully we don’t have to wait too long for all this speculation to be put to bed.

Head over to Cesar Gueikian’s Instagram account for more unofficial updates.

It’s hard to believe that Metallica’s original bassist, Cliff Burton, would be in his sixties today had he not died in a tour bus accident in September 1986. Fortunately we'll always have the classic basslines he threw down on Metallica's breakthrough album, Master of Puppets.

On the opening track, the thrash-metal classic Battery, he laid down the gauntlet with a breakneck metal riff that Burton not only copped with his superhuman fingers, but enhanced and slightly reharmonized along the way.

In a 2006 interview with a Swedish newspaper about the 20th anniversary of Burton's death, Metallica frontman James Hetfield credited him with expanding the band's harmonic horizons. “We never would have written guitar harmonies like that, or songs with very intricate melodies and orchestrations, without Cliff.”

Technically, the sheer speed of this track is the main area of concern. Not only does it clock in at 202bpm in some sections, but Burton plays everything fingerstyle including some impressive octaves. And with Robert Trujillo now holding down Metallica’s bass chair, all can see that it's not only possible to pull off Battery with just your fingers, the band actually prefers it.

Let's look at the physical technique first. The good news is you never have to leave the E string. The bad news is, your plucking hand needs to be in serious shape to play this line without a pick, as Burton did.

Start by striking the first note with your index finger, then get your gallop on by playing the two 16th-notes and following eighth-note with a three-finger rake: ring finger, middle finger, index finger. Repeat the gallop and return to regular plucking-hand fingering for the last three eighth-notes of bar 1 of the riff.

Can it be done with just two fingers? Sure, but the three-finger gallop gives it a sonic texture that's closer to the original intention. Plus, galloping is way more metal! Like anything, slower tempos are recommended for practice, especially as you build the Burton-level endurance necessary for the complete assault.

Inevitably, this particular style takes a long time to develop, and some of the faster octave sections will be a stretch even with the standard two-finger approach. You could leave out some of the 16th note rhythms to help you negotiate some sections, but you'll lose the drive so consider using a pick.

Harmonically, Burton tips off his awareness of the greater musical picture with just four notes of the line. The guitars and bass are essentially in single-note/power-chord unison the whole time except for the last three eighth-notes of bar 2 and the first eighth of bar 3, where the guitars play E minor 3rds.

Burton takes this opportunity to emphasize each interval's minor 3rd in the lowest register possible, propelling the riff in a subtle, but effective way. He was a classically trained pianist, and his knowledge of theory – combined with his fearsome bass technique and windmill-headbanging – helped shape Metallica into the multi-platinum monster it eventually became.

Burton played a Rickenbacker 4001 and an Alembic Spoiler, which was later stolen. His preferred Aria Pro II was likely used for this album, however. Burton also used Mesa/Boogie amps and a custom-built 115 cabinet.

The stat sheet of Metallica's self-titled 1991 ‘Black’ album reads like a record executive's wildest fantasy.

It's the best-selling album in the United States in the last 30 years, with over 17 million copies sold, and has spent over 600 weeks in the Top 200 album charts in total. Onstage, in the three years after its release, the band played hundreds of live shows to millions of eager fans. One could go on, but the bottom line is, by 1993, the band had more than earned a break.

It'd be until 1996 before the titans returned with Load, an album that served as a further departure from the brand's frenetic thrash roots. As James Hetfield told Guitar World in an interview around the album's release, the time away from Metallica was both a blessing and a curse.

“I've conditioned myself to need [music] for so long that I can't be away from it for too long,” he said at the time. “It's like, ‘Whoa, I've got to fuckin' pick the guitar up and start playing.’ And it's scary when you haven't played for quite a while and can't remember the riff to Seek & Destroy!

“It's hard to figure out what you want to do when you come off a two-year tour,” he continued. “While you're out on the road, you make up this list of things that you want to do when the tour's over, and then when you get home you end up vegging. It's a strange feeling to be on your own again, not to have the Metallica family around you.”

Over the years, Hetfield has been open and candid with fans about occasionally feeling unsure in his playing, telling a stadium-sized crowd in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2022 that backstage he had felt like “an old guy,” and that he “can't play anymore,” doubts he overcame with the support of his bandmates.

Just this year, he admitted on the band's official podcast, The Metallica Report, that he suffered guitar-related nightmares prior to the most recent leg of the band's M72 tour.

“I start to doubt myself, [thinking] ‘We're old, we can’t do this,’” he said. “I was having nightmares about how I’m the only one who cares about what we're doing here: ‘Where is everybody?’

“The guitar neck is made of rubber, and there are only two strings on it. ‘Where's my roadie?’ and the guitar cord won’t let me get to the microphone. Silly stuff like that.”

But, the undisputed master of metal rhythm guitar added at the time, it’s “part of the [touring] cycle; it just is. You have anxiety build up, and don’t let it get the best of you. And as soon as you get up there, it’s all gonna be good.”

If you need a new excuse to buy more guitars, try this: Metallica’s M72 world tour includes an arsenal of 64 electric guitars, 32 of which need to be riff-ready at any given moment.

WCCO-TV’s Jeff Wagner was given a peak behind the scenes as the tour rolled into Minnesota, and the logistics are enormous. The touring crew consists of 156 personnel, which includes 40 steelworkers, with an additional 168 local production hands and 92 truck drivers. 800 locals are also employed to support each specific date.

But the number of six-strings that are brought along for the ride is what really catches the eye. That figure of 64 is split between guitar and bass, with the 36 gig-ready axes equating to 12 instruments per member.

Justifying that inflated figure, tour coordinator Jon-Michael Marino told WCCO-TV: “Across, let's call it 15-16 songs, there's various tunings. There's also things that happen naturally like strings breaking, guitars going out of tune that have to be swapped in the moment.”

Metallica’s current run has found the metal titans stop at each destination city for two nights, and perform two independent sets with no repetition. That’s a grueling run for the musicians and instruments alike, and so a suitably vast army of guitars has been assembled to roll with the punches of such heavy touring.

Adding to that array of guitars – which is likely to include Kirk Hammet’s latest signature guitar, the ESP LTD KH-V, and his iconic Greeny Les Paul – are 6,000 guitar picks, used or given away to the crowd each show, and 25 drumsticks that succumb to the same fate. Per night.

Therefore, across Metallica's five September dates, roughly 30,000 picks will be needed – roughly the same amount this writer probably has down the back of his couch.

To be fair, the construction of the eight towers, wrapped in LED screens, amounts to 36 hours of labor. They each weigh over 14 tons and are nearly 100ft tall. It would seem wrong, then, to tour with just a handful of instruments.

Kirk Hammett raised eyebrows late last year when he proclaimed that, no matter how impressive a player's solos are, they're going to be forgotten by most listeners: “I hate to say it, but non-musicians – who are the majority of the listening world – are not going to remember guitar solos,” he told Total Guitar.

Metallica’s 1988 album …And Justice For All may be a well-respected part of the metal titan’s expansive back catalog, but it's especially notable for its inaudible bass guitar.

In an interview with Metal Injection, the record’s producer, Flemming Rasmussen, theorizes why the band minimized Jason Newsted’s presence on his maiden Metallica record, believing it was a purposeful decision.

“I think – but this is purely speculation – they did it to get some kind of reaction from Jason,” says Rasmussen, who was also behind the desk for Ride The Lightning and Master of Puppets.

“What they hated the most about Jason was that he was a fan. He was never disagreeing or anything, or stating his own opinion. I think they were waiting for him to kind of state his place in the band… they probably did it to get a reaction, and when it didn’t come, that was the way the album turned out.”

It’s certainly an interesting theory. At the time, the band were still adjusting to life after Cliff Burton’s untimely passing in 1986.

Primus’ bass wizard Les Claypool auditioned for Metallica as the band sought a suitable replacement who could become a strong creative force in the band, but it was clear he “didn’t fit in”.

Eventually, Newsted was given the job, but it would prove to be a tricky transition for a band still in mourning.

“For him [Newsted] and for us, it was difficult,” James Hetfield reflected in a 2018 interview with Blabbermouth.

“Psychology 101 will tell you that all our grief and sadness got directed at him, and quite a bit of it was that he was an easy target.

“He was goofy enough to take it, which was a positive for him, and he was such a fan, and we hated that. We wanted to ‘unfan’ him.”

Since the record’s release, there have been multiple fan remixes – like ...And Justice for Jason – and cover versions, which show what the record could have sounded like had (if we are to go off Rasmussen’s theory) Newsted showed some bite.

Three years after the album dropped, Newsted discussed his new role in Metallica, and claimed his playing style brought a tightness to the band that his predecessor's did not.

Newsted left Metallica in 2001 and would go on to play in Ozzy Osbourne’s band among other projects. His replacement in 'Tallica, Robert Trujillo, joined having already played with the Black Sabbath singer.

Metallica are one of the biggest bands in the world, but that hasn’t made James Hetfield immune to very human emotions. 

Speaking on an episode of the band's official podcast, The Metallica Report, Hetfield says he suffered nightmares of malfunctioning guitars ahead of their latest world tour, leading to anxiety and imposter syndrome. 

“I start to doubt myself, [thinking] ‘We're old, we can’t do this,’" he said, (transcribed by Metal Injection). 

“I was having nightmares about how I’m the only one who cares about what we're doing here: ‘Where is everybody?’

“The guitar neck is made of rubber, and there are only two strings on it. ‘Where's my roadie?’ and the guitar cord won’t let me get to the microphone. Silly stuff like that.” 

There is – to his credit – an acceptance from Hetfield, adding that it’s “part of the [touring] cycle; it just is. You have anxiety build up, and don’t let it get the best of you because of you. And as soon as you get up there, it’s all gonna be good.” 

Hetfield has previously talked about his struggles on and off stage. He admitted to a 60,000-strong crowd in Brazil in 2022 that he felt “insecure” about his guitar playing that night. 

He said he felt like “an old guy”, and that he “can't play anymore”, before admitting it was all “bullshit that I tell myself in my head” – but those dark thoughts had crept into his mind regardless. 

Last year, he told Apple Music about the weight on his shoulders when it came to fronting the tour on the Black Album tour in the face of the record's dizzying success.

“There was such an expectation already on myself to not let the team down and be the best possible,” he said. “But then you add 60,000 people out there... You need to be what they need you to be because this is what you've evolved to be.”

“Off tour, it's like, ‘Who am I?’ Like any first responder, football player, or soldier, you take your uniform off and you're a civilian again. I don't know who I am.’ There was a lot of fear in that.”

Despite his insecurities, Hetfield is regarded by many as the undisputed master of metal rhythm guitar. 

For Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher, meeting his idol pushed him to improve his craft. Echoing that sentiment, Alter Bridge and Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti said he “wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for Master of Puppets” and Hetfield’s ultra-aggressive downpicking style.  

Metallica’s latest world tour, in support of its new album, 72 Seasons, got off to a headline-worthy start as the band battled torrential rain and thunderstorms in Munich. 

The tour takes the band through Finland, Denmark, and Norway this month, before headlining Hellfest in France.  The band will then play the US, Canada, and Mexico in August and September. 

Head to Metallica’s site for the full venue and ticket details.

Brian May has made another special appearance at Slovakia's STARMUS festival, following his “challenging” collaboration with Jean-Michel Jarre last week. This time, he joined punk rock legends The Offspring for a special performance of Gone Away and Queen's Stone Cold Crazy.

The audience was treated to an orchestral arrangement of the band's 1997 hit Gone Away, which accompanied Dexter Holland's solo vocals. Midway through the song, the rest of the band, along with May, joined Holland on stage. As expected, the Queen guitarist put his own spin on the song's original guitar solo, with a little help from his trusty Red Special.

In the video recorded by fans, Holland is seen saying: “Brian, so nice of you to join us. So nice [of you] to hop in on this one! What a treat." The Offspring plus May then went on to perform Queen's Stone Cold Crazy from the 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack.

“OFFSPRINGMANIA !!!! I am so happy !!! If it never gets any better than the dressing-room run-through we just did, it will STILL be one of the most joyous moments of my ol' life !!! STARMUS and Bratislava are in for a treat,” posted Brian May.

In an interview with Total Guitar, May revealed how Stone Cold Crazy, known for its punk-rock drumming and quasi-thrash metal sensibilities, came about and unexpectedly gave birth to a new subgenre.

“Freddie had written the lyrics with his old band, and the original riff was very different – it sounded like the riff in Tear It Up [from 1984 album The Works]. So that original version of Stone Cold Crazy sounded like a lot of other things which were around at the time.

“But I thought: these lyrics are kind of frenetic, so the music should be frenetic as well. So I put this riff on it, which people are telling me is the birth of thrash metal or something! I don’t know about that. But was unusual at the time to play at that pace.”

The Offspring now join the ranks of punk and metal bands that have covered Stone Cold Crazy. Metallica famously covered the song, plus a few expletives, for Elektra Records' 1990 compilation album, and later used it as Enter Sandman's B-side, subsequently winning a Grammy.

Two years later, James Hetfield performed the song at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium, with Queen and Tony Iommi.

The old adage “never meet your heroes” usually rings true. However, for Mastodon's Bill Kelliher, meeting guitar heroes like Metallica's James Hetfield and Slayer's Kerry King were key moments in his career that pushed him to improve his guitar playing. 

“It was funny when I first met Hetfield, who's been an idol of mine. It was in Portugal or some big festival we were doing, and I shook his hand,” Kelliher says on The Rockman Power Hour podcast. “I was like, ‘Thank you for teaching me how to play guitar.’ And he was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Like, you know what I'm talking about. You paved the way for me.’”

Meeting Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo was another surreal moment for Kelliher. “When I met Kirk and Robert, they were walking around together and they saw me, and they came running over and they're like, ‘Hey, man, what's up? Can we get a picture with you?’ I was like, this is a joke. Like, I should get pictures. Yeah, you guys are Metallica. I'm just fucking Bill from Mastodon. That's awesome. It was wild.”

Rubbing shoulders with his heroes was also important for Kelliher to realize that he needed to take his instrument more seriously. One incident, in particular, served as a true wake-up call. 

“Watching Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman warm up before a show and I'm walking around drinking a beer. ‘What are you guys warming up for? Know your fucking songs,’” he recalls. 

“And then I realized there's something to this. I started practicing guitar way, way fucking more. I was like 'You're a guitar player. You're in this really big fucking band. You should be better, like you should spend your time not drinking and playing more guitar. Get better at your craft.’”

Kelliher has previously spoken about his experiences meeting Metallica and their diligent practice routine. In a 2021 interview with Guitar World, he recalled, “Metallica practiced for three hours a night before playing onstage for another two. Meanwhile, we were sitting around drinking beer and picking our noses!”

Mastodon will be heading out on a co-headline tour with Lamb of God this July. The co-headline tour celebrates the 20th anniversary of the two band's 2004 albums Leviathan and Ashes of The Wake respectively. The tour kicks off on July 19 at Grand Prairie, Texas, with Kerry King supporting on select shows. 

You’d be hard-pressed to find Metallica songs that hit harder than the four that open Ride the Lightning. If you were there in July of ’84, you remember where you were the first time you gazed at the album’s cover, which depicts an electric chair in the middle of a midnight thunderstorm.

Based on that grim imagery, it’s expected that themes of death and destruction would run rampant throughout Ride the Lightning. But this was a thrash metal album, and the rage nestled up against sociopolitical commentary. Despite Metallica’s inherent youth, Ride the Lightning found success tackling tricky subjects… and chugging riffs and hair-raising solos.

The latter portion of that statement came into greater focus when Kirk Hammett told Guitar World in 2014: “Around the time we were writing Ride the Lightning, I was taking guitar lessons from Joe Satriani. All the stuff I learned from Joe impacted my playing on Ride the Lightning. 

“He taught me stuff like figuring out what scale was most appropriate for what chord progressions. He taught me how to pick the notes I wanted for guitar solos, as opposed to just going for a scale that covered it all. He also helped me map out the whole chromatic-arpeggio thing, and the importance of positioning and minimizing finger movement. That was a really important lesson.”

Going back to Ride the Lightning’s opening four tracks, Fight Fire with Fire, Ride the Lighting, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fade to Black, it’s evident that Hammett took what he’d learned and made a conscious decision to stamp his imprint across thrash metal, which, at the time, was not a fully established genre.

This was before Master of Puppets (1986) would cement Metallica as legends. And it was years before the Black Album, aka Metallica (1991), turned them into the biggest band in the world. Back in ’84, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett were four young hellraisers looking for good times via skull-stomping music, and boy, did they find it. 

From the jump, Ride the Lightning showed growth, as Fight Fire with Fire opens with an acoustic section by Hammett before Hetfield kicks the door in with a riff akin to a sonic assault, at which point Hammett pops the clutch, and chimes in with power chords and a blood-letting solo that somehow simultaneously errs toward low-key blues.

Three tracks later, on Fade to Black, Hammett and Hetfield showed their worth via an amalgam of downstroke riffage and perfectly phrased, lyrical solos that found Hammett doing anything but relying on only his wah pedal for interest.

These two songs are important signposts for Metallica, as was the ominous For Whom the Bell Tolls, as they proved the band was capable of stepping outside the shadow of Dave Mustaine, who, despite being fired before its recording, claimed three songwriting credits on Kill ’Em All. 

Throughout Ride the Lighting, Hetfield showed why he’s the finest rhythm guitarist in metal and a lyricist capable of tackling heavy subjects like suicide and loneliness. The result was Hetfield and Hammett emoting their rage-filled compositions in ways that no other heavy metal guitar duo was at the time.

Along with that growth in musicianship, Metallica added variety to Ride the Lightning after Fade to Black wrapped by swooping into Trapped Under Ice, a speed metal cut that lifts off and soars into Escape – a dead ringer for an early ’80s Judas Priest cut, with just a touch of blood-soaked buzzsaw blade riffage dusted across the top. 

And that wasn’t arbitrary, as Metallica, specifically Burton, Hetfield and Hammett, applied what they’d learned from Kill ’Em All and combined it with youthful rage and existing knowledge.

“Cliff studied music in college,” Hammett told GW in 2014. “I had a grasp of music theory, thanks to Joe, but Cliff went the whole length and learned musical theory and everything. [Cliff] was way into harmonies, and James really absorbed the dual-harmony thing and took it to heart. He made it his thing, but it was originally Cliff’s. Cliff also inspired James greatly on counterpoint and rhythmic concepts.”

Regardless of who brought what idea to the table, Metallica was speaking a new language across Ride the Lightning. To Hammett’s point, many of Burton’s nuances are present throughout Creeping Death. But digging into the track, it reads back as a riff tour de force via Hetfield, which Hammett sends home with a bliss-toned solo.

But of all the tracks on Ride the Lightning, the most daring is the nearly nine-minute epic instrumental closer, The Call of Ktulu. With gentle arpeggios in stark contrast to a heavy, doubled riff and multiple iconic solos, the track proves that as a soloist, Hammett isn’t reliably repetitive, but, instead, a definitive thrash maestro.

Metallica’s James Hetfield has had Lemmy Kilmister’s literal ashes tattooed onto his middle finger, making it a contender for one of the most metal tattoos, well, ever. 

The Iron Cross and Spade imagery often sported by the late Motörhead and rock ’n’ roll legend was made from a mix of black ink and a “pinch” of Lemmy’s ashes. 

The bassist passed in 2015 aged 70 after a short battle with cancer, having enjoyed a prolific ear-splitting career that saw him help make more than 20 albums and play an insane number of shows.

After his death, Lemmy’s ashes were encased in a series of bullet casings, which were sent to some of his closest friends. That list included Whitfield Crane, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, and Michael Monroe.

“With the steady hand of friend and tattoo artist @coreymillertattoo, this tattoo. A salute to my friend and inspiration Mr. Lemmy Kilmister,” the post reads. “Without him, there would be NO Metallica.

“Black ink mixed with a pinch of his cremation ashes that were so graciously given to me.”

The reaction has been, as you can imagine, very positive, with one commenter offering: “Absolutely the most badass tribute possible.”

It's unclear how Hetfield sourced the ashes for the tattoo, but it's possible they were supplied by someone who had been given one of those Lemmy-engraved bullet casings.

Now, Metallica had previously paid tribute to Lemmy with their track, Murder One, (which featured on their 10th album, 2016's Hardwired…to Self-Destruct), but this is a completely different level of immortalization altogether.

Indeed, Metallica’s Instagram post says the tattoo means Lemmy “is still able to fly the bird at the whole world” – and we’re sure Lemmy would applaud the spirit of that sentiment.

Mark Tremonti has had a hugely successful career as the guitarist in Alter Bridge and the recently reunited Creed. But as he admits: “Honestly, I wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for Metallica and Master Of Puppets!”

In this exclusive interview, he explains how his life was changed after hearing that classic album, and why down-picking has become one of his greatest strengths.

What do you remember about your first time hearing Metallica?

“One of the most important Metallica tracks for me is Welcome Home (Sanitarium). When I heard my older brother playing that in the bedroom above me, I just couldn’t fall asleep.

“So I went up there asking, ‘What’s this song about a sanitarium?!’ He gave me Master of Puppets and I did not sleep that night. I was just blown away by what I was hearing. Before that, I was listening to the Beastie Boys, Agent Orange... nothing metal. Hearing that album made me go out and carry on searching for the heaviest music I could find. 

“What I loved most was the dynamics. That’s something I really credit Metallica for. A lot of heavy bands from that period didn’t use dynamics like they did. Metallica would write these beautiful intros on songs like Battery, Damage, Inc. and The Call Of Ktulu, the latter being the song with which I developed my own fingerstyle technique. Then there was all that beautiful stuff in To Live Is To Die. 

“My favourite song of all time could very well be Orion. That variation is a really big thing for me, going from cleaner verses to those kick-you-in-the-nuts choruses, which is what you hear on Welcome Home. Funnily enough, there’s a video online of me covering that song on a Hello Kitty guitar!”

It’s no secret that a big part of that sound comes from James Hetfield’s down-picking...

“James Hetfield’s right hand shaped me as a guitar player. All of us have our strengths and weaknesses, right? It usually comes down to what you grew up playing and practising. With me, I know one of my biggest strengths is all that right hand downpicking rhythm stuff that sounds like ‘Jud jud jud’ because it just keeps going like an engine. That’s where I feel comfortable. 

“I don’t need to warm up for that stuff, I can go straight into it because that’s my background. I learned it from bands like Metallica, Slayer, Forbidden and Testament... but Metallica were always the main one. Guitar-wise, Metallica were always more influential on me.”

It’s interesting how a lot of those riffs don’t sound quite right using alternate picking.

“As much as you might not realise it, upstrokes and downstrokes sound a bit different probably because of the angle of the pick. Picking downwards has a bit more of a slice to it, while coming up is usually a bit rounder. That’s why there’s something special about that downward motion – there’s a consistency. I know this might sound weird to beginners, but sitting there for an hour just picking downwards is an artform in itself.

“We tend to dig in and play harder when using just downstrokes. With alternate picking, a lot of us lighten up. I remember Paul Reed Smith picked up one of my guitars once and said, ‘I’ve never seen frets this worn down!’ I just can’t help playing hard and it’s because James plays hard. 

“Another difference between him and Kirk is which hand leads and how they hold the pick. Kirk uses more of his left hand virtuosity and holds the pick like most players. James is more right hand-led and holds the pick with his thumb, first and middle fingers. I hold my pick that way, too! I don’t know why, but two fingers and a thumb helps me dig in harder and heavier, plus it feels like there’s more control. Now I have to play like that. I didn’t realise it wasn’t the normal way of holding a plectrum!”

There are similarities but Kirk also draws from his own pool of strengths.

“They’re two very different players, but you have to remember Kirk has to keep up with James when they play those fast riffs live! Kirk is a great alternate picker. He’s also a big reason why I love wah pedals so much, he often does those big one-string wah runs that I love. 

“Metallica have two very different guitarists and I think that’s how every band should be. Me and Myles [Kennedy, Alter Bridge guitarist/vocalist] are different – he’s more jazzy and bluesy, and I’m more of a metal guy. We complement each other’s sounds, using different amps to fill different frequency ranges to build a bigger picture. That’s something Metallica have always done.”

What are your favourite Metallica solos, then?

“There’s millions of great Kirk solos. A lot of the ones I’ve mentioned like Sanitarium, Orion and To Live Is To Die have my favourite leads, and One has a beautiful solo. I remember learning that when I was in high school and having so much fun picking it apart. I spent so much time learning all these riffs and solos over the years. 

“Metallica are such a big part of my DNA as a player. Both James and Kirk are great blues players – what James does on Nothing Else Matters is all straight pentatonic stuff. That’s what I tend to enjoy the most these days. Maybe when you’re younger you prefer all the flashy stuff, but as you get older you appreciate the bluesy stuff on a deeper level. 

“You can’t get away from the pentatonic scale. That’s what speaks to your heart. When you hear rock ’n’ roll vocal melodies, they often come from the pentatonic scale because those are the most emotive notes.”

You’ve used Mesa/Boogie amps a lot over the years. Would it be fair to say that’s partly down to Metallica?

“Yes! I remember getting the Mesa/Boogie 2C+ and they’re probably the most sought-after Mesa amps. They go for a lot of money on Reverb because they’re incredible. I also think the Dual Rectifier Rev F is one of the best amps ever made. 

“They’re very different, though. The Rectifier is like the big schoolyard bully that pushes everybody else out, it sounds so big. The 2C+ is more focused and has this great scooped sound that makes you want to play more and more. The Rectifier eats it up by taking more sonic space. And it goes beyond amps. I actually have one of James’s guitars! 

“Years ago, one of our security guys was working for them and I mentioned I’d love one of his used instruments. And James was totally cool with it as long as I replaced the one I took with a new one. So he signed this LTD Explorer for me – which was awesome!”

Have you interacted with them much over the years?

“When I first met them, I was really intimidated because they were my heroes. I’ve met them many times now and they’re all very nice. The last show we did together was Download Festival and Lars came into our dressing room to chat for half an hour. 

“Later that night, I was watching from the Snakepit. Kirk came along during Fade To Black with his serious face on. Then he spotted me and smiled, saying, ‘Hey Mark!’ It was funny because I was smiling like a schoolkid waving at him and saying, ‘He knows me!’ I’ve probably hung out with Kirk most. Something similar happened a few years ago. 

“We were on stage watching them when Fade to Black was starting. The intro was on and Kirk came over, took off his in-ears and said, ‘Hey man, how’s it going?’ I asked what amps he was using and he told me he was running a Kemper plus this and that. Then I said, ‘Dude, your solo is coming up in four seconds!’ and he laughed, saying ‘Oh shit!’ while running off with his in-ears back in!”

• Mark Tremonti’s festive album Christmas Classics New & Old is out now.

There are players who curate and coddle their electric guitars – and then there are players who make them their own. James Hetfield’s new guitar book Messengers showcases perhaps the ultimate example of the latter: a 1959 Gibson Les Paul ’Burst that has been inscribed by the Metallica frontman.

In the book, Hetfield reveals he owns five ’Bursts and showcases four of his Golden Era Gibson guitars, all of which rank among the rarest and most valuable models in the firm’s history: a ’58 Korina Flying V, a ’58 Korina Explorer and two 1959 Les Paul Standards, dubbed ‘Rick King’ and ‘Roman’.

The former LP is named after the vintage Gibson dealer/broker who helped Hetfield to find and inspect the guitar. 

However, it’s the latter, Roman, (serial number 9-2339) that immediately caught our attention – largely due to the fact that Hetfield has carved an enormous ‘XII’ numeral into the rear of the body.

“With the Roman, I was fortunate enough to go to a friend that had quite a large collection of Les Paul Bursts,” writes Hetfield in Messengers. 

“He allowed me and a few other guitar players that he respected to come in, play them, and pick one. I brought my half stack to his place, he laid them all out, and I played them one by one.

“I narrowed it down to four, then kept plugging them all back in until I arrived at this one. 

“It's called Roman because of the Roman numerals I etched into the back. It's the number twelve, because that was the twelfth guitar that I played out of all the ones I was very fortunate enough to try out.”

From the storied OGV, to ‘Uncle Milty’ (a modded 1973 Les Paul, with an embedded Iron Cross), Hetfield has a long and brilliant history of graffitiing and decorating his guitars. 

As such, the bold move is in keeping with Hetfield’s long held approach to ownership. However, it’s hard to think of another contemporary example in which a guitarist has so significantly altered a ’Burst. 

There were certainly plenty of mods made to instruments from the rarified 1958-1960 ’Burst era before they acquired their reputation – such as the Bigsby-equipped Bolin ’Burst, now owned by Joe Bonamassa – but it’s vanishingly rare to see one intentionally carved by a current owner, particularly in the era of half-million price tags. 

Indeed, it raises a debate about the nature of ownership of historic instruments. Are ’Burst buyers owners or custodians? We’ve seen plenty of examples of players who regard themselves as the latter.

Joe Bonamassa is said to own 10 ’Bursts, but his collection – while toured and played – has a focus on preservation and restoration. Indeed, he has previously hinted it will wind-up as a museum exhibit, once he passes on.

Hetfield’s onstage partner, Kirk Hammett, meanwhile, owns one of the most famous ’59 Les Paul Standards of all time, ‘Greeny’. 

He has teamed up with Gibson for a range of exhaustive reproduction models, most recently the Epiphone Greeny Les Paul. Hammett also recently listed for sale a remarkably clean ’59 Les Paul dubbed ‘Sunny’ via Gibson’s Certified Vintage program.

Regardless, the news of Hetfield’s extensive ’Burst collection also adds further context to the story that the Metallica frontman passed up an opportunity to purchase Greeny himself. 

That, in itself, raises one hell of a ‘what-if?’ scenario. Even Papa Het would not have put Greeny under the chisel… would he?!

For more (utterly fascinating) insight into Hetfield’s astonishing guitar collection, we highly recommend you check out the full Messengers tome.

• Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield is available now from Amazon and Metallica.com.

“It feels like the last week of school; nobody wants any tests, nobody wants any drama,” says Chad Zaemisch, the guitar tech for James Hetfield. Guitar World was able to catch Zaemisch at Metallica’s last show of 2023 on their two-year 72 Seasons World Tour, before the band and the crew take a deserved six-month break from a grinding schedule. 

While Metallica has taken a step back from the grueling tour itineraries that earned them their reputation as a formidable live band, they haven’t lost sight of the experience of a Metallica concert. Which means that the entire production is a fulltime job for the band and the crew. 

“We can't come in in a day and set this whole thing up like we used to. We started all this on Monday. There’s a lot more coordination, a lot more production. These large towers [are] the most laborious thing,” says Zaemisch.

The towers, which stretch from the floor to the ceiling and house the PA and video screens, need to be set up before crew like Zaemisch can even come into the arena. “When there’s room, we can kind of start creeping in here. The band or Lars might come and start rehearsing on Wednesday.”

On the 72 Seasons tour, Metallica are performing in the round, on a stage that is 120 feet in diameter. For crew members like Chad Zaemisch, this means that his office at Ford Field is in front of 60,000 people. 

“We’re not really doing this like normal, and that’s sort of the Metallica way. It's almost like a metaphor for the online experience these days, where you can't say or do anything without it being under a microscope,” says Zaemisch. 

There is an immense weight on the shoulders of techs in a band like Metallica. In addition to fans recording concerts on their phones, Metallica also records each concert to be sold as CD or download through their website. “We try to do the best we can every night. Nothing is like, ‘Oh, that was yesterday. We don't worry about that.’” 

2023 marks Zaemisch’s 20th year with the band, and you don’t keep your job in one of the biggest bands in the world without trying to be better than you were yesterday.

“I would always work on an amp sound in the tuning the band uses, which is D#. You kind of have to focus on that low note,” says Zaemisch.

But when he would hand Hetfield a guitar like the purple Snakebyte, the baritone used for songs on St. Anger, Zaemisch noticed issues with the way that their analog gear responded to the low tunings. “Especially with James, the sound has to be chunky, but the bass frequencies can’t hang over too far because he’s such a percussive player.”

For many years, navigating the variables and limitations of analog gear came with the territory of being the guitar tech for the biggest heavy metal band in the world. But when the band were asked to play Carlini Base in Antarctica, they were faced with one major challenge: in order to protect the arctic wildlife, the stacks of heads and cabinets – essential to Metallica’s ferocity – were not welcome on the trip.

Enter: Axe-Fx, Fractal Audio Systems’ top-of-the-line amp modeling rig. With this system, the band was able to wirelessly transmit the sound of their guitars directly into the headphones of the 120 audience members inside a dome constructed on Carlini Base for the concert.

“We did our best to duplicate the sound of the analog rigs [in Antarctica],” says Zaemisch. The results were better than many expected. “One of the very first things I noticed when we plugged into the Axe-Fx was that I could focus the EQ down in the right area for the low chunk and it still translates to a guitar that’s been tuned lower.” 

This opened up several doors for Metallica’s live sound. “All of a sudden, these things that the band might only be able to do in the recording studio were now possible outside of the recording studio,” says Zaemisch. “An analog amp responds differently to something that is tuned down, whereas the Axe-Fx can take whatever that information is and deal with it a lot better. It’s insane.

“Before, I needed two huge racks. I needed a main head and a spare head. Since James relies on two amp sounds, I needed another rack that had the other stuff, the other heads, like the Diezel heads that we used to use. I had another small rack that had the clean sound and the [Roland] JC-120 head. It was so much equipment.”

When the band left all that analog gear behind for the Freeze ‘em All show in Antarctica, not only did they quickly see advantages in the stability and consistency of their sound with the Axe-Fx, but they were also happy with the economical advantages that the compact systems offer.

“The first time that we sent them overseas, they paid for themselves,” Zaemisch reveals. 

While the advantages of transitioning the band’s live rig from analog to digital were clear, it was understandably met with a bit of apprehension. “After Antarctica, we were faced with [questions],” admits Zaemisch. “Are we going to go in another direction, with the Axe-Fx, or are we going to go back to the way things were?”

“We didn’t really have another band to point to and say, well, Sabbath is using it, or the Scorpions are using it. I have to hand it to James. He had the foresight to say, ‘Let’s try it. Maybe we’re the people to embrace it.’ It’s been a cool journey.”

But the bedrock of heavy metal is a wall of Marshall stacks so loud that they rattle the pictures on your neighbors’ walls. So in order to make sure the band can still feel the music, Zaemisch and the Metallica crew push the guitars out to eight Meyer monitors on the stage. 

“Like anybody else, James wants to stand in front of cabinets and feel his pants shake,” says Zaemisch. “There’s [eight] hotspots on the stage, four for James and four for Kirk. The hotspots have 12-inch cones in them, and the normal vocal monitors have 10-inch cones in them. We like the bigger ones just for a little bit more chunk. If James wants a little sustain or wants some feedback, he knows to go to a hotspot. I mean, no guitar player wants to go without being able to do that, right?” 

“We needed to kind of be able to hear what it would sound like as a 4x12 but also through the PA because that's ultimately where it was going to go. [So,] we took a pair of these Meyer monitors, plugged them straight into the output of the Axe-Fx, and got all our sounds that way,” he explains. 

As much as Hetfield himself was spearheading the adaptation of these futuristic amp modeling systems, he has had no such approach to his guitars. His new book, aptly titled Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield, essentially serves as Hetfield’s memoir, wherein he shares the story and personal significance of his most treasured guitars. Many of the guitars featured in the book come with Hetfield on the road. 

“I have ‘Carl’ out here with me,” says Zaemisch. “Carl,” featured in Messengers, is a guitar by Ken Lawrence that is made out of the wood from the garage where Metallica wrote and arranged both Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. “It’s cool, and it has a lot of history, but it’s a heavy guitar, weight-wise. So it wasn’t a favorite to play.”

When you prowl as much as Hetfield does on stage, it makes sense to choose a guitar that’s on the lighter side. Hetfield’s White Snakebyte guitar, the “OG Snakebyte,” is a favorite of Zaemisch’s for that reason. 

“The White Snakebyte, I can kind of slip it in on songs that I would traditionally use more of a Les Paul-shaped guitar,” says Zaemisch. “It fits in with a bunch of different eras [of Metallica].”

There is a lot of collaboration between Zaemisch and Hetfield in terms of which guitars the frontman will play throughout the live show. 

“Over the years, I know the vibe he kind of wants,” says Zaemisch. For example, the band has been opening their concerts on the M72 World Tour with three “old-school” songs to begin the set. For those songs, Zaemisch will hand James the “New Electra” guitar, a copy of the white Electra V that Hetfield bought in the band’s infancy. 

“That V was surprising. I was afraid [at first]. I was like ‘Oh no! It’s a 70s copy?! I gotta make this thing work?’ Lo and behold, it holds a tune really well. It’s my only bolt-on neck. Fortunately from Gary Brawer [guitar repair based in the Bay Area] having it and the original construction from the Japanese plant, they actually made some pretty good guitars.”

For the new songs, Zaemisch will hand Hetfield the new 72 Seasons ESP Vulture. Hetfield has had a relationship with ESP Guitars since he met Matt Masciandaro at the NAMM show in 1987. With every new album, it seems that ESP is more than happy to help Hetfield out with a new guitar. 

“We’ve got to have one new, shiny guitar, right?” Zaemisch laughs. “James got together with Matt Masciandaro and mocked up a couple of things with their art department. Up until the last minute, this guitar was going to be a bright yellow, [but] James kind of chickened out and decided to do it black and make the stripe yellow.”

One of the more unusual guitars Zaemisch will hand Hetfield is a Line 6 Variax 700, used for The Unforgiven and Fade to Black. Named Unforgiven, after the jaw-dropping pyrography by Dino Muradian, this guitar is, by definition, an electric guitar.

The preamp modeling inside the guitar – by Antares – allows the guitar to sound like a traditional acoustic without the feedback issues that arise from mic’ing up a hollow guitar in an arena. 

That modeling inside the guitar was born out of necessity. “There was one company that had a wireless MIDI system that let me down a few times,” says Zaemisch. One of the times he is referring to, of course, is when the preamp modeling failed and the guitar wasn’t tuned properly for Fade to Black. 

“I’m sure you can find the video online. Our normal tuning is D#, and there’s one video [online] where the program change didn’t make it to the guitar, so it was stuck in E. When the intro tape started, it was a half-step up. James lost it and kicked the guitar over.” 

Of course, this sent all the armchair quarterbacks in the YouTube comments into a frenzy. “‘Well, dude, you had one job to do!’” laughs Zaemisch. “You can’t explain to somebody in two sentences why [the guitar] wasn’t correct,” he shrugs.

Not wanting something like that to happen again, Zaemisch started looking into other technologies that would be more reliable. Through trial and error, he realized that he would have to carve his own path, so he started his own wireless technology company, Lite-Time.

“[During the pandemic,] I just sat down and started learning as much as I could. You have to be able to tell yourself that you’re gonna make mistakes, and that’s okay. I retrofitted some of Rob’s expression pedals with my wireless stuff,” says Zaemisch. 

It’s likely that mindset is what has helped Zaemisch keep his job as James Hetfield’s right-hand man for nearly 20 years. That, and the trust Hetfield has in Zaemisch. 

“Once in a while, [I’ll hand him a guitar] and he’ll be like ‘This one??’ [and I’ll say] ‘Yeah. It’s gotta be that one,’” he laughs. “He trusts me. He doesn’t really want to think about that stuff.”

• Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield is available now from Amazon and Metallica.com. The M72 tour continues through 2024 – see Metallica.com for full dates.

A thrash metal pioneer in possession of one of the greatest right hands in six-string history, James Hetfield is an icon of the electric guitar – and he’s amassed quite a collection of instruments over the years.

From his earliest Electra Flying V copy – the guitar that changed the course of his history – to his ESP signature guitars, awe-inspiring Ken Lawrence custom creations and enviable vintage models, the Metallica frontman has a remarkable number of guitars to his name, and every one has a story.

Hetfield tells those tales in his new book, Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield, detailing his evolution as a guitarist and a human being with each new instrument.

Yet few hold the emotional weight of his ESP Horizon double-neck – aka the electric guitar he was playing when a pyrotechnic charge hit his left side during a 1992 show at Olympic Stadium, Montreal. The guitar shielded Hetfield from the very worst of the flames, and its scorched neck serves as a reminder of the traumatic incident that left him unable to play guitar.

In this exclusive extract, Hetfield recounts his memories of the moment the flames struck, and how he came to terms with the accident that very nearly derailed his career.

1991 ESP Horizon Double Neck Montreal – by James Hetfield

The Double-Neck Montreal makes me think of the smell of your own burning flesh.

I did not have a double-neck Explorer at that time, which I eventually did get and nicknamed the “Coffee Table” because it’s so friggin’ giant and heavy. But for the 12-string sound on Fade to Black, ESP lent me whatever they had, and this was it – the ’89 Horizon, the double-neck I played Fade to Black on every night up to Montreal. It was retired after that.

If you look at the photos, you can see I had my hand around the neck where it’s all white, and you can then see where the rest is charred. It was so hot the strings popped. I don’t hate this guitar because of what happened, that’s for sure. I don’t hate the pyro guy, anyone, or anything, really. Things happen for a reason, and for some reason I was meant to stop playing guitar for a little while.

Out of all the stuff that I’ve gone through, breaking wrists, breaking arms, and then this, I’m pretty grateful that we’ve had people to stand in and play guitar. And it’s good thing that, I don’t want to say I can sing, but it’s a good thing I have another job in the band. Job security! 

It was not a fun time, that’s for sure, but I’m just glad it wasn’t worse. At the gig, I remember throwing the guitar down, going backstage and just watching the skin bubble up and start to slough off. 

I remember putting it in ice water. That felt so great, but as soon as I took it out, it was right back to, well, are flames still on it? There was a panic that set in with me, like, Oh, shit, this pain is not going away. I remember a security guy helping me along. He didn’t speak English, but he knew the right thing to do – let’s get in a van, let’s go to the hospital.

I really remember being in the back seat of the van and, arrgh, the pain. I have huge respect for people that have gone through any kind of major or minor burn on their bodies. Whether you’ve grabbed a hot pan or tried to get the bagel out, all of a sudden you’re hurting. It was to the bone. That was brutal. 

This guitar is historic, part of our journey. And this was a couple days after we’d just been down in Mexico having a little break from the tour with Guns ’N Roses because Axl’s voice went out. We had just come back, and this happened.

It’s pretty cool that the guitar neck itself is a natural color, not painted black, so you could see the charring on it. If it was black you wouldn’t have. It probably would’ve just looked like bubbled-up paint.

The accident was unfortunate. At that time, the pyro stuff was not as safe as it is now. There was no extra spotter, so when he looked up to make sure he was good to fire it, everyone looked clear, then he’s unlocking stuff, and then goes to press the button. If there’s a delay of even two or three seconds, we’re onstage, moving around, and I had just forgotten and moved onto the flame. 

I didn’t have any fear of looking at the guitar. I had maybe a little more fear of pyro, or playing the song Fade to Black onstage, but the guitar didn’t cause any of this. It’s like the analogy of falling off a horse – you’ve got to get back on. It’s not the song’s fault, it’s not the guitar’s fault, it’s not pyro’s fault either. It’s just circumstances.

Courtesy of Permuted Press. All Rights Reserved.

• Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield is available now from Amazon and Metallica.com.

Dave Mustaine recently discussed the first time he got to witness James Hetfield play guitar, describing the moment as “kind of shocking.”

These days, Hetfield is renowned as one of the planet’s finest rhythm players, but clearly that was not the case in the early ’80s – even amongst those who knew him best.

Mustaine is interviewed in the new issue of Metal Hammer and – among the other ups, downs, and, well, unadulterated chaos of life as a thrash metal legend – recalls his earliest rehearsals with Metallica.

At that time in their careers, Mustaine says the burgeoning thrash icons were still finding their feet, with Hetfield preferring to take on vocal duties and leave his electric guitar at home. 

As such, the band were hosting auditions for a rhythm guitarist, but had struggled to find a good fit. Meanwhile, Mustaine, says he wasn’t pushing himself as a guitarist, either.

“I was kind of playing at Lars [Ulrich]’s level, because Lars was still learning to play drums back then,” says Mustaine (via Louder). 

“But watching James play guitar for the first time was kind of shocking, because I didn’t know he knew how to play guitar.”

Mustaine says Hetfield’s move to rhythm duties was born more out of a lack of options, rather than any need for Hetfield to prove himself. Indeed, he compares the experience to his own fruitless search for an alternative singer in Megadeth. 

“We just got fed up one day of auditioning guitar players, just like I did with singers,” says Mustaine.

“And he picked up this guitar and started playing, and inside I’m going, ‘Get the fuck out of here. How can you possibly be satisfied being a singer when you play like that? Why not be both?’ I’ve always thought he was a really talented guitarist.”

The animosity between Mustaine and Metallica seems to be long gone now, and the Megadeth man has been dishing out the compliments lately – not least to Kirk Hammett. 

Back in Mustaine’s June Guitar World interview, the guitarist was asked his opinion on Hammett’s lead work on Metallica’s new album, 72 Seasons. 

Rather than twist the knife, Mustaine took the chance to discuss how Hammett did him an honor taking on his Metallica solos –  and pointed out just how quickly metal guitar’s armchair critics had turned on Hammett. 

“There was a time when Kirk won every guitar contest in the world, and I don't think he's gotten any better or worse as a player,” said Mustaine. “He's always been really good… he's been steady the entire time he's been in Metallica.”

To read Mustaine’s full interview, check out pick up a copy of the new issue of Metal Hammer.

Following the tragic death of legendary Metallica bassist Cliff Burton in 1986, Jason Newsted had worked hard to get his name to the band, and felt certain he was the bassist they needed, but Burton was no easy act to follow. Looking back in 1999, Newsted told BP that “I wouldn’t wish my first years in Metallica on my worst enemy as far as the emotional stress goes, but I always felt I was the guy to take over from Cliff.”

Newsted’s bass sound didn’t always feature highly in the mix during his early recordings with Metallica, but on Load, his fourth record with the pioneers of thrash metal, his growling 4-string – tuned down a half-step – drove the band, along with Lars Ulrich's signature kick drum. Newsted even braved a fretless bass guitar on Until It Sleeps. Had he finally earned the props he deserved?

“Metallica had just celebrated its 15th anniversary and we had finally discovered how you're supposed to put things together,” said Newsted. “We used to be much more meticulous in the studio; James Hetfield would come in six hours after I was into the first song and say, ‘Dude, what's up with that?’ It was a breathin'-down-your-neck type of thing... ‘Get that bass shit happening!’

“With Load, I went in with engineer Randy Staub and producer Bob Rock, and we went crazy on the bass. If the bassline just went dun, dun, dun, dun, I'd make it swing like it never did before. The other guys would come in and listen to the bass and ask, ‘What's that?’ They expected it to be straight, but after they had listened to it a few times, they'd start snappin' their fingers. They even changed guitar parts to go with the bass, which was the first time that's happened.”

Newsted went on to play with Metallica for 15 years before being replaced by Robert Trujillo in 2003. This interview is from the April 1997 issue of Bass Player, which followed the release of Load.

Let's talk about the new record. There seems more room for the low end to breathe.

“The construction of the songs was the main factor. There was also a lot of counterpoint playing and feeding off each other. The first single, Until It Sleeps, was actually the only song we've ever written in the studio while jamming. Somebody played a riff, we counterpoint-played for a second, and that was the first single. It was a special, cool thing.” 

So you've gone back toward a more traditional style of bass playing? 

“Yeah, I'm still evolving in that direction. The parts are more simple; if you let 'em get going too much, they could easily get away from you and lose their groove. It's easy to turn on the faucet all the way for an hour, but to be able to do that for ten minutes, and then go to a mid-tempo song, and then go to Nothing Else Matters and try to sing for real instead of just barking – that takes more focus and control. Fast doesn't equal heavy. Even when you're playing a slow song, you can create a heavy mood. That's part of being an entertainer.” 

How closely did you work with James Hetfield in the studio?

“James had a lot to do with the bass parts on this record; he planted the seed in me that the bass can go to different places. His songs are always really good, but now I've realized it's up to me to make them great. His songwriting is always going to be up here, and I'll always write metal-101 songs and love 'em. That became clear to me by the time I went in to play my tracks on this record, so I just applied myself to the songs and focused on the pieces.” 

Did James ever make any bassline suggestions to you? 

“If he did, it was when I first heard the songs in Lars's Dungeon, which is an eight-foot-square room with a full drum set and three Marshall stacks. The first time I was shown the tunes, I'd take notes and then record my parts; if James heard something that was clashing, he'd let me know as we went along. It used to be more of a 'Do this' kind of thing, but now it's more of an approval and an appreciation. James had heard some of the tapes I made in my studio and knew I had been playing a lot, so he just showed me the songs. He knew I could do it.”

So you're happy with the outcome?

“I really am. Five years ago, I'd be kind of down if I didn't have a writing credit for the initial riff of a tune on a record, but being the bass player in Metallica and making James's songs better is how I have to approach it. When we did the tour for the black album and the record was selling 14 squillion copies and every show was sold out, it seemed like I could do a freakin' four-minute speech and the crowd would always go crazy. Then I'd do eight minutes of bass meandering, but I would never subject people to that again. Now, I do a one-minute-long bass solo and that's it – no more words, unless I have something to say that day.”  

I hate to use the word "maturing," but.... 

“I don't mind that, because I think that's good – although sometimes it sounds more like aging. I'm still young inside and I'm such a big fan of music. You don't have to grow up, but you can get older and become more considerate. And you can make grown-up decisions, which we all have to do.”  

It sounds as if you've been through some musical changes since the last Metallica record?

“My musical interests keep getting wider. I love listening to tribal, indigenous music and to Alan Lomax's recordings and the Smithsonian Institution stuff. There's a custom in some cultures where there's one song that's your name. And when it's time for customary celebrations, you sing your song and present it to the village. The idea that music can be so internally instilled makes me think very deeply. I've also been reading about blues and jazz players to see how certain types of music were created. Its purity has opened me up to the 'no rules' thing – just lettin' it fly and not worrying about how long a song is.”

Any favorites? 

“Son House, man. He's tops for me. And Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Leadbelly... there are tons of others. As for jazz, I like some of Miles Davis's older stuff, some Coltrane, and older big-band stuff, such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Louis Armstrong did amazing things as far as presenting crazy music to white people and eventually getting mixed bands to play for mixed audiences. I like Charles Mingus, too; I just bought a video recorded in 1968 that shows him in his apartment loft shootin' holes in the ceiling with a shotgun. He'd walk around, sing to himself, and then go over to the piano and knock it out.” 

There are a couple of tunes on Load that will surprise Metallica's more hardcore fans. 

“Hey, I'm down with the guys who want Napalm Death and Sepultura – that shit is cool. Sepultura is my favorite band on the planet. And I can appreciate the people who want us only to go fast, but don't disrespect the people who paved the way and broke down the doors for so many of the groups you enjoy now. One of the bands that played a big part in that was Metallica. We're the guys who wrote Damage Inc., Fight Fire with Fire, Whiplash ... you name it, we helped to invent it. And we can still play it better than anyone. I'll go up against any death-metal band – pound for pound, hour for hour, we'll crush 'em. I have great for respect them, but those are the facts.” 

Load is available to buy or stream.

James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett have been kicking heavy metal ass for 40 years. In 1983, it was the band’s mission statement, with their debut album originally planned to be titled Metal Up Your Ass until Kill ’Em All eventually stuck. And if their debut set the scene for the burgeoning thrash metal genre, their next three albums defined it until 1991, when their self-titled ‘Black Album’ sent the band to the stratosphere, hitting number 1 worldwide. 

Like most guitar bands who reach their fifth decade, Metallica’s back catalogue offers a wealth of riches for any six-string slinger on a mission to play better. The Phrygian and Aeolian modes are core harmonic essentials, with powerchords and downpicking techniques appearing in almost every song the band have ever recorded. 

But emulating their style is far from simple. Dual-harmony guitar lines are often more complex than mere 3rd- and 4th-interval affairs, and syncopated riffs at fearsome tempos provide serious technical workouts. 

For now, plug in, crank up the gain and let’s look at Hetfield and Hammett’s most important techniques, as employed from their ’83 debut right up to this year’s 72 Seasons. Wah pedal optional. Downpicking is essential!

Example 1. Powerchords and gallops 

We’re taking inspiration from 1984’s Fight Fire With Fire and the title track from the band’s latest release 72 Seasons here. 

Use alternate picking and palm-muting to play the open sixth string, but lift your palm away from the strings for the powerchords. Strum these with downstrokes and use slides to shift between them where indicated. 

Example 2. Slow stomping syncopation

Here we’re showcasing the pull-off technique of Sad But True and the stomping syncopation of this year’s You Must Burn. In bar 1, your aim is to sound only one note at a time, so make sure to mute each open string after you’ve played it. 

For bar 2, it’s all about space. The syncopation comes from hitting those powerchords on the offbeat while staying dead silent in the gaps. 

Example 3. Hit the powerchords

This riff demonstrates the kind of two-note powerchord shapes on display in tracks such as Hit The Lights, albeit in F# minor here. Play the doublestop shapes with a first finger barre followed by your third and fourth fingers together. Turn your hand from the wrist for the semitone bend and release.

Example 4. Battery-style gallop

Use tight palm-muted picking to play the Battery-style galloping rhythm on the sixth string here. This is played with a combination of downpicking for the eighth notes and alternate picking for the faster 16ths. Use the tip of the pick to glide across the string for a consistent tone, and don’t pick too hard.

Example 5. Justice-style blues scale soloing

Kirk is a fan of soloing with the blues scale – and we’re channelling ...And Justice For All along with new track Shadows Follow here in a scalic line played along the first string. For our repeating four-note phrase, use a downstroke followed by a pull-off, then pick ‘down-up’. Pull off with your first finger as you move up and down the neck.

Example 6. Classic Hammett repeating lick

This repeating lick is a staple Hammett phrasing idea, appearing in one form in Enter Sandman and being reinvented recently in Too Far Gone. 

Play the repeating lick with a third-finger bend/release, pull off to your first finger, then finish with your third finger on the fourth string. This repeat is three beats long, but when played against the 4/4 drumbeat an interesting displacement happens. 

Example 7. Heavy harmonies

Harmony guitar parts have featured heavily in Metallica’s recorded output, from 1984’s Fade To Black, to 2016’s Atlas Rise and new album track Inamorata. Our lick here is the higher part of a two-guitar harmony in E minor (E F# G A B C D). Listen to the guitar on the backing track to match the timing and intensity so the guitars blend as one.

Example 8. Triplet-phrased leads

Recent single If Darkness Had A Son is our inspiration here as we home in on some repeating three-note phrases in bar 3. Use your third, second and first fingers respectively, picking each 15th fret G note before pulling off to the 14th (F#) and 12th frets (E). Take care with the rhythm. Unusually, nine notes cover half a bar here. 

Example 9. James-style downpicking

This riff is based on Heftield’s legendary downpicking technique which he uses in eighth-note riffs around the 200bpm mark in Master Of Puppets and Blackened. Use your wrist to bounce the pick off of the string and keep your arm relaxed so as to maintain the movement for long periods. 

Your arm may feel more relaxed when straighter, so try playing in a standing position with your guitar slung low.

Example 10. Shape 1 Pentatonics

Kirk’s soloing style draws heavily on pentatonics – and our lick here is the kind you’ll hear in everything from Hit The Lights to Room Of Mirrors. It’s a simple pull-off idea played on the two highest strings. Try adapting our lick through any two-note-per-string E minor pentatonic scale shape.

Greg Fidelman first worked with Metallica as engineer on the 2008 album Death Magnetic – a result of his long association with that album’s producer Rick Rubin. 

Since the late 90s, Greg has served as engineer on numerous albums produced by Rubin, including System Of A Down’s self-tilted debut, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, the posthumous Johnny Cash release American V: A Hundred Highways and Black Sabbath’s final album 13. 

It was on the 2011 album Lulu, Metallica’s collaboration with Lou Reed, that Greg took on the role of co-producer alongside guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. He has continued in this capacity on 2016’s Hardwired... To Self-Destruct, 2020’s live album S&M2 and now, this year’s 72 Seasons.

“It’s not your traditional hard rock record,” Greg says as he gives TG the inside story of its creation...

When you started making 72 Seasons, what conversations did you have about how you wanted it to sound?

“Initially everyone was isolated. We started trying to write songs remotely. So some of the usual chats you would have before walking into a project didn’t happen. It was more, ‘Do you think we could try to cobble together some riffs and some song ideas while we’re waiting this thing out?’ 

“Then we got together for a Helping Hands benefit broadcast from Metallica HQ. We thought, ‘Let’s show up a week early and stay a week after, and in person work on these songs that we had.’ Everyone was so excited to get started, and so excited to be playing together. We never really looked back.”

Was there a specific aim within the band of what direction this album would take?

“No-one felt there was a reason to stray very far away from what we had done on the previous record, Hardwired... To Self-Destruct. We definitely talked about more of trying to capture a live feel, because everybody was so energized by being in the same room and playing the stuff together. It’s not your traditional hard rock record where there’s a drum tracking session and then everything else is an overdub. 

“Big parts of it are from the live take with all four of them playing at the same time. When it happened it was still like, ‘Oh my God, that feels great. We’ll never beat that!’ Maybe there’s a vocal overdub because at that time he hadn’t written all the lyrics, but trying to keep the live feel; that was in our playbook from the start.”

There’s more midrange and less gain on the guitars than some past Metallica albums. Were you using more British-style amps?

“James has always had one of the legendary José Arredondo-modded Marshalls, a late-’60s/early-’70s Superlead head. When we did Hardwired... it wasn’t working very well. When we started this album I had a re-invigorated interest in this head. I was talking with Dave Friedman, who is very familiar with those old José mods, and he fixed it. When I got it back, I told James I thought it sounded insane, and he got really excited about it. It ended up on every song. I think that’s what you’re hearing.”

What other guitar amps were in the mix?

“James has combinations of multiple amps and the balance between them changes from song to song. There’s always a Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC++ that he’s had forever, and then this José Marshall – at least a combination of those two. 

“There’s also usually a Wizard 100-watt head that’s usually got a Klon Centaur pedal on it. He also has a Diezel head. When we need to find a bigger bottom end, especially on the slower songs, we can bring that in. It has huge low-end that the other amps don’t have.”

And Kirk?

“For Kirk, it’s different for solos and for rhythm [guitars]. For rhythms, Kirk had a couple of different Friedmans. Sometimes it was the HBE Deluxe and sometimes it was some early HBE head that Dave Friedman modded. We had a Marshall a 50-watt master volume JMP, I think a ’79, that just sounds amazing. 

“For solos, we had a 100-watt master volume JMP that’s a little more gritty and scoopy, and we would combine that with a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier. Kirk also had an old Kirk Hammett signature Randall head that has a really clear, defined midrange. 

“That was always nice to add to the mix so it could be super-overdriven but not blurry and fizzy – you can still hear the notes. We’ve got hundreds of cabinets over there but James almost always ends up on similar – the Mesa/Boogie and Marshalls go into old Marshall cabinets, and the Diezel I think goes through Mesa cabinets. Similar stuff for Kirk: a mixture of older Marshall cabinets with either 30- or 25-watt Celestions. 

“For solos, usually we’ve got a cabinet or two with 75-watt Celestions, and there’s a Mesa cabinet labelled Black Shadow. I think they might be Eminence speakers, probably from the mid-’80s, but those also sound really good.”

What guitars were they using?

“Kirk used Greeny and his original Mummy guitar. He’s got a hundred ESPs that look like the Mummy. I don’t know what it is about that one in particular, but it noticeably sounds a little different than all the other ones, and it’s just great. James has his Flying V that he had from Kill ’Em All. It’s a Gibson copy, but that thing sounds incredible. 

“When he puts that guitar in his hands he immediately wants to play fast riffs. So if it’s a fast song, for sure it’s got that on it. He double-tracked all of [his] stuff; sometimes triple-tracks. We usually double with the ESP Explorer with the middle-finger inlays. I think it’s the first ESP that he got – that guitar sounds incredible. 

“Then he’s got one of his signature model Snakebytes that is a strange copper colour. We’ve tried 15 or 20 different Snakebyte guitars, and this one just was a little bit nicer for whatever reason. The majority is the V or the Snakebyte combined with the ESP Explorer on the double track. On a couple of the mid-tempo to more slow songs he used a Les Paul.”

A few songs have kind of a ‘Black Album’ vibe. Was that a conscious decision?

“I don’t think it was, but when we were putting songs together, it’s almost subconscious to want all these different styles. You want to have some fast-ripping, thrashy songs, and some mid-tempo Creeping Death thing that’s not super fast but it’s not slow grooving ‘Black Album’ either. 

“Then you want to have a Sad But True – that’s the classic reference in from my head anyways for Metallica being slow but heavy. We didn’t write songs to fit any of those categories as much as we had a bunch of ideas, like, ‘We’ve got four or five big, heavy, slow riffs, and there’s one no one’s that excited about but everyone loves these others. Maybe we should work on these.’”

Do you use classic Metallica tracks as references for writing or arrangements?

“I guess for arrangements. On the song Too Far Gone, there was a section that when we first started working on it we would call the ‘Leper’ section because something about it reminded James of Leper Messiah [from Master Of Puppets]. We have those kinds of references, a language instead of calling everything ‘verse’, ‘chorus’ or ‘bridge’. 

“It’s not just Metallica references, either. There are definitely songs with ‘the Sabbath riff’. It’s not a Sabbath riff, but when they’re playing it, this is like what I remember Black Sabbath being like when I was 13.”

Parts of Inamorata have a real Sabbath vibe.

“Yeah, I think Inamorata is in C# or some very bizarre key. It was a riff from the tuning room when they were warming up before a show. I don’t know why James was in C# when he was coming up with it. When we started working on it we said: ‘This is a weird key. Maybe should try this in A or in E?’ But for some reason that’s just not as cool. 

“You’d think, ‘Let’s put it lower, it’ll sound even heavier.’ But it was the opposite. When we tried it in more common keys, everyone was like, ‘Now I don’t like it so much!’ So we embraced that challenge of writing a heavy song in C#. You don’t really have a lot of open strings as an option in that key, so it was to come up with some ideas that we may not have otherwise come up with.”

What direction did you give Kirk on his soloing?

“I think it’s well-known that Lars likes to be involved in solos, and they work together in a unique way. I’m sort of a third partner in that. Kirk comes in improvising most of the stuff, but when we’re recording or rehearsing the songs, every now and then something that would go by that someone would say, ‘Hey, could you mark that for later?’ 

“So when it came time to actually record solos we always had that stuff ready to go. A lot of the songs had a bunch of things that we thought were cool as a springboard, although they were improvised initially. We would listen back to all these and start being like, ‘Oh that that’s a cool place to go there, that’s a good entrance, that’s a great ending.’ So he improvised to get the feel and ideas, but then we would have a plan.”

This feels like the most cohesive Metallica album for a long time. How did you achieve that?

“We talked about making it a collaborative effort, more than the last couple of records. [We wanted] all four guys to be more involved, to act together at the same time as opposed to working on it separately. That’s a goal we set and one I feel confident we hit. We had the guys in the same room as much as possible when we were writing and tracking this record, and everyone’s getting their two cents in. It’s a better record because of it.”

• 72 Seasons is out now on Rhino/Blackened Recordings.