“I’m getting arm cramps just watching this”: The brutal shred-fest that has quietly become one of our biggest playthrough videos

Cannibal Corpse - Condemnation Contagion (Erik Rutan guitar playthrough) - YouTube

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It’s one of those excellent internet quirks. How has an – admittedly, astonishing – video by one of metal's most extreme standard-bearers become one of the most-watched videos on Guitar World's YouTube channel?

We could delve into some cod-muso sociology, but at this point we have come up with two answers to that question: 1) Erik Rutan and 2) We dunno...

A rubber-stamped endorsement from YouTube metal guru Karl Rock may have helped get things moving, but this feels like one of those word-of-mouth successes that only a warm community of cold-blooded fret slayers could deliver.

Regardless, sometime last year, the video found its audience, views shot up and the comments flew thick and fast.

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“I’m getting arm cramp just watching this,” said one.

“The best fucking riff ever,” said another.

“That freaking guitar needs a cigarette.”

“I soiled my pants watching this.”

“Smacking that low string like it owes him money.”

And so on. We've been enjoying the comments almost as much as the playing itself.

It shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. If you’re in the market for brutal death-metal riffing, Cannibal Corpse have been at the forefront of the scene since its early ‘90s explosion, and show no signs of letting up on either the gore or the guitars.

Back in 2021, for their 15th studio album, Violence Unimagined, they were joined by guitarist Erik Rutan. A death-metal legend in his own right, Rutan is the leader of Hate Eternal, a fill-in shredder for the likes of Morbid Angel and an in-demand producer.

Around the time of release, Erik made this video for us: a playthrough of the Violence Unimagined track Condemnation Contagion.

Armed with his BC Rich USA Ironbird (featuring a Gibson Dirty Fingers humbucker at the bridge and Bill Lawrence L-500 at the neck), Rutan runs into a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier hooked up to a Marshall cabinet loaded with Celestion Greenback speakers and juiced with a Maxon ST9 Pro+.

Erik's varied rhythm approach on the song combines grinding, power chord-heavy chugs punctuated by pinging pinch harmonics and full-on blastbeat-fueled tremolo-picked lines.

His leads, meanwhile, alternate between melodic octave phrases and blazing harmonic-minor-tinged, sweep-picking-fueled shreds. The outcome is a gruesome addition to Cannibal Corpse’s impressive legacy of brutality.

“This was the last song I completed writing for our new album Violence Unimagined,” Rutan he told us. “I was writing it as COVID-19 was becoming a full-on pandemic. Heavy and dark in its origins, it came out to be a song like nothing I have ever written before.

”Since the song has a lot of two guitar-part harmonies and counterpoint, for this video I chose to feature the parts that stick out to me the most during the song at specific moments.

“A majority of the song is ferociously down-picked interweaving with other subtle elements. The solo is one of my personal favorites on the album. It has a nice feel and flow to it.”

Watch and learn. But watch out for those arm cramps.